World’s most mysterious book
The WSJ had a piece two days ago on the Voynich Manuscript, dubbed “The World’s Most Mysterious” book. “ The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown, possibly meaningless writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance.” -Brainly.
“The text was written in either a code that has not yet been cracked or a natural language and cipher that haven’t yet been identified. Its numerous illustrations of plants, astrological signs and women in thermal baths might point to its meaning-but for the fact that none of the plant species has so far been identified and the astrological signs correspond to none that we know. The women seem to be engaging in a sort of therapy common to many parts of Europe in the 15th century, but where they are precisely, and why they are bathing together in vast waterworks connected by strange tubes and ducts, is anyone’s guess.” -Justin E.H. Smith, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 25, 2021
“For awhile, scholars suspected that Voynich created the manuscript himself as a hoax. The book dealer’s larger-than-life biography, which included a stint in a Russian prison and a trek across the Mongolian desert, seemed to lend credence to such theories -WSJ
The manuscript is currently in the possession of Yale University’s Beinecke Library.
“Recent scholarship has generally disputed the Friedmans’ findings [that it was an artificial rather than a natural language], suggesting that the manuscript’s ‘word entropy’ indicates a natural language written in cipher. -WSJ
Last year, however, German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig from the Roemer -und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, believes “he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript’s language to be based on Hebrew.” — The Art Newspaper, June 18, 2020.
Scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists can’t figure it out, or they think they do until they don’t….
https://youtu.be/KUUKtyXuRvU
Seems that we have a problem of communication with folks from 500 years ago…
More to come…
Originally published at https://wallstreetdealmaker.com on September 27, 2021.
