hey 42 here the voynich manuscript is without a doubt one of the most mysterious inexplicable and downright intriguing objects on planet earth today it has been called a message from god a hoax an elaborate secret code the product of mental illness a treatise written in a lost language a guide to an alien world or simply the notebook of an eccentric scientist written in his own indecipherable shorthand since it came to the attention of the public a little more than a hundred years ago it has been served as the inspiration for a plethora of novels a
classical music album several works of art and at least one tv episode it's even appeared as an easter egg hidden away in more than one popular video game franchise and yet this strange artifact whose story spans centuries and touches the lives of some of history's most colourful characters is nothing more than a simple book about the size of a modern paperback if you were to visit yale's beineckey rare book and manuscript library where the voynich manuscript resides today and leaf through its 240-yard vellum pages you would find a curious flowing script in likely faded browning
surrounded on almost every page by weird and wonderful painted images depicting people plants animals astrological diagrams curious contraptions maps to strange lands and much more the odd little book is split into six distinct sections botanical astrological balneological which relates to medicinal springs cosmological pharmaceutical and recipes all of this sounds interesting enough so far but alone it doesn't explain why the voynich manuscript has attained the status of a true enigma nor does the fact that it's over 600 years old there are plenty of older books out there tucked away on dusty bookshelves and great libraries across
the world and nobody's fought to make music about any of those no what makes the voynich manuscript so special is much simpler than all of that nobody alive has ever been able to read it or should i say nobody alive has ever been able to understand it now you may not be able to read the voynich manuscript but you can enjoy thousands of other books with today's sponsor blinkist it probably wouldn't surprise you if i told you there's little i love more than reading non-fiction books but these days i rarely get the time i'm sure
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unlimited access for one week to try it out completely free and you can cancel at any time during that period but if you just can't get enough then through my link you'll also get 25 off if you want the full membership despite the painstaking attentions of master cryptographers diligent language experts learned art historians and a whole cadre of internet sleuths not one person has ever been able to make sense of a single word written within the voynich manuscripts pages and its strange alphabet has never been seen anywhere else in the world and then there are
those painted images i mentioned whilst the people look familiar enough most of them are rendered completely naked and could stand to lose a pound or two the plants are much less easily identified not a single one of them bears more than a passing resemblance to any of the species found here on earth exactly who wrote the voynich manuscript in which language and for what reason is completely unknown and just what the hell it's all supposed to mean is a question that has captivated imaginations across the world ever since the book was uncovered by the man
it's now named after wilfred vainage voynich was born in november 1865 to polish parents in the city of telstra which was part of the russian empire at the time and can be found today in lithuania he was something of a free spirit in his younger days getting himself arrested in his early twenties thanks to his membership of the social revolutionary organization known as the proletariat which ultimately led to his imprisonment in her cuts siberia a place famous today for its historic town center and for being abysmally difficult to defend in risk voynich was a resourceful
man and he managed to escape before his five-year sentence was up keen to put some distance between himself and his turbulent past he made his way to hamburg where he traded his last good waistcoat and a rather dashing pair of glasses for a ticket on a ship bound for england voynich dabbled in a little more revolutionary work over the next few years from his new home in london but perhaps deciding he'd had enough of being shot at and stabbed and no doubt growing complacent on a steady diet of tea crumpet and remarkably orderly queuing he
finally decided to leave his wild days behind him a highly educated man who is said to have spoken 18 languages he decided to settle down and get himself a real job as an antiquarian bookseller voynich also found love in london marrying another former revolutionary called ethel boole author of multi-million selling novel the gadfly and daughter of george bull whose boolean logic is credited with having laid the foundations for the information age i've said it before and i'll say it again all the famous people in the past knew each other it was in 1912 that voynich
made the discovery which he is known for today whilst visiting the villa mondragoni which lies about 20 kilometers outside of rome villa mandragone was owned by a group of jesuits at the time of voynich's visit and despite their grand and prestigious setup the imposing villa montragoni was the site where the gregorian calendar was first developed it turned out that the jesuits were a little strapped for cash voynich was more than happy to line their pockets in return for a chance to go home with a few of the rare manuscripts stored in the villas library amongst
the 30 items he purchased that day was the book now known as define it manuscript it was immediately clear to wilfred voynich that this latest addition to his collection was old and more than a little strange in the hundred or so years since he came into possession of this now legendary artifact many people including voynich himself have attempted to piece together the manuscript's origins its first known owner is thought to have been rudolf ii or to give him his full title rudolf ii holy roman emperor king of hungary and croatia king of bohemia and archduke
of austria i think i'll stick with rudy frequent viewers of this channel will be delighted to hear that rudy was a member of the infamous house of habsburg inbreeder's extraordinaire and that yes he did indeed have a chin like a sledgehammer rudy is thought to have come into possession of the voynich manuscript towards the end of the 16th century when it was already some 200 years old and he is said to have been so intrigued by its curious content that he bought it from the previous owner for the princely sum or should that be multiple
kingly sum of 600 venetian duck hats that's a little more than two kilograms of solid gold not bad for a tatty old book king rudy was a character to say the least he's known to have kept a lion and the tiger as part of his prized royal menagerie and he was so fond of the beasts that they were allowed to roam freely around his home castle prague yeah that went about as well as you might expect but rudy wasn't a bad guy and he was more than happy to pay compensation to the survivors of the
unsurprisingly frequent attacks and playful maulings his favorite pets dished out or more commonly to the deceased's grieving and no doubt a recoverably traumatized family he was also a devoted alchemist and pursued a lifelong quest to get his hands on the philosopher's stone tragically unaware as he was that said mythical object was hidden under a trap door guarded by a free-headed dog at hogwarts all along rudy was also keen on astrology and even commissioned a personal horoscope from french astrologer nachodarmus armed with this priceless insight into his own future you'd think rudy would have been prepared
when his own brother moved against him to take the throne some years later but apparently not king rudolf ii died nine months later stripped of all his powers and the mysterious book he paid a literal king's ransom for was passed to his personal doctor yakko bus of teppence whose signature so faded with age it's only visible under ultraviolet light can still be found hidden within the voynich manuscripts pages today from yakibus the manuscript made us into the hands of george baresh a czech alchemist who would spend the next 20 years of his life attempting to
unearth its secrets chipping away at the mystery in vain until the day he died baresh bequeathed the manuscript to a trusted friend in his will who in turn passed a book onto his mentor the celebrated 17th century scientist afrancius kircher known as the master of a hundred arts it seemed like a smart move kercher was a learned man he had recently shot to fame as the first person to decipher egyptian hieroglyphics who better to uncover the secrets of an unreadable manuscript the plan did have one slight flaw though despite his claims kercher had not in
fact deciphered egyptian hieroglyphics at all and the majority of his assumptions and translations were later found to be completely false make that master of 99 arts then the voynich manuscript seems to have proven impenetrable to kircher and here it disappeared back into relative obscurity stashed away in the library of colegio romano where kercher worked the manuscript was to remain there no doubt gathering a thick layer of dust for more than 200 years until rome was captured by victor emmanuel ii one-time king of sardinia and eventual king of italy who promptly confiscated the collegiate romano's library
luckily the college's rector at the time managed to rescue some of the library's most important books including the voynich manuscript transferring the lot to the villa manjagoni where as we've seen voynich would be along to find it some 46 years later now run a simple google search and you'd be forgiven for thinking the voynich manuscript had been solved half a hundred times there are endless articles and a good dose of youtube videos even documentaries out there claiming the 600 year mystery has finally been defeated but every time some young hopeful comes up with a new
and promising theory the scientific community stoically steps up to the scholarly plate and bats it out of the park the very first such claim was put forward by william newbold a professor of philosophy at the university of pennsylvania and a cryptography enthusiast who was hired by voynich himself to unlock the secrets of his prized possession newbold research led him to the conclusion that the writings within the manuscript was in fact meaningless but that a secret code based on ancient greek shorthand and visible only with the use of a magnifying glass had been hidden within the
letters themselves disguised as natural patterns within the ink ingenious newbold claims to have translated entire paragraphs of the text using the code which reveals the author to be none other than english polymath and franciscan freya roger bacon this theory has unfortunately been thoroughly debunked it turns out those secret markings cleverly disguised as patterns within the ink were in fact yeah just naturally occurring patterns within the ink who'd have thought it still the idea that the voynich manuscript is some kind of highly elaborate cipher persists and some of the greatest code breakers to have ever lived
and breathed have had a crack at solving it hoping to uncover some long-lost secret hidden within its pages perhaps the most prominent is william f friedman considered by some to be the greatest cryptologist of the modern age friedman was a brilliant man his team broke japan's cipher codenamed purple during the second world war and he was instrumental in the founding of the nsa in the us where he was installed as its first chief cryptologist friedman was so intrigued by the voynich manuscript that he put together a crack team of cryptologists to unlock his secrets this
pet project spanned four decades of friedman's life but despite all his brilliance and dedication he eventually concluded that solving the voynich manuscript was in fact impossible suggesting it was written in a made-up language friedman isn't the only one to conclude that the manuscript can't be solved for the simple reason that there's nothing to solve that we can't extract any meaning from its strange pages because there was no meaning there in the first place just a lot of rather pretty gibberish some proponents of this theory believe that voynich himself is behind the fabrication after all a
lost text of links to the likes of francis bacon would likely be worth a fortune something an antique book dealer would know better than anyone on the face of it it's quite a compelling argument voynich had a clear motive as well as the know-how to pull it off and make it look good but the voynich manuscript isn't just good it's perfect and if it really is a hoax it's one of the most elaborate ever conceived for a start the manuscripts pages have been radiocarbon dated to between 1404 and 1438 the idea that voynich might have
been able to get his hands on 240 untouched sheets of 500 year old vellum made from calfskin in 1912 to turn into a book is near inconceivable and considering radiocarbon dating wasn't developed until the late 1940s long after voynich first publicized his find it's difficult to see why he would have bothered trying to source such an old material to write on in the first place the inks and paints using the manuscript also exactly match those used in early 15th century europe something else we've been able to prove only with modern techniques and the same attention
to detail seems to have been paid in the book's language too which demonstrates statistical features we would expect to see in real natural language features we also didn't understand back in 1912. wilfred voynich may have had the motive but he would have needed to be in the possession of the predictive powers of notre dame himself to have avoided all yet to be discovered scientific traps that lay waiting to reveal any deception on his part decades later the voynich manuscript it seems is very much the genuine article and to this day professionals and amateurs alike continue
to dedicate countless hours trying to finally solve its many mysteries and many claim to have solved it once and for all even presenting examples of fully translated pages but there's always the inherent issue of how can we trust the veracity of a translation when the only person in the world who claims it's correct is the translator himself the truth is so far every attempt that decoding it has either been declared to be false by an independent body or not peer-reviewed at all and thus no more than an unverified hypothesis in 2016 we even let an
ai have a crack at it completely in vain and in some ways perhaps that's for the best whilst the true meaning behind the unknown text remains a mystery the voynich manuscript will continue to stimulate our collective sense of wonder and illicit excited scholarly debate the moment we figure out that it's actually the world's most ancient and vulgar collection of that's what she said jokes the charming spell will be broken thanks for watching thanks again to blinkist for sponsoring this video don't forget to check it out using the link in the description
