#Voynich manuscript for sale series

We have settled on the v101 transliteration by Glen Claston, rendered in the Intermediate Voynich Transliteration File Format (IVTFF) of Zandbergen. The subtle details of the various transcription efforts, and their history, are available at:, with the raw data available at. As the alphabet is unknown, there are minor uncertainties in rendering the text, leading to a number of similar but competing transcriptions. The text is separated into paragraphs, of which the final line is justified to the left.Дue to the diligent activity of several generations of Voynich researchers, the text of the manuscript has been transcribed into a machine-readable format. This is uncontroversial and apparent from even a cursory inspection of the text itself the horizontal flow of the writing is clear, with lines clearly starting at the left margin and ending before the right.

The manuscript is written from left to right, and not the reverse, vertically, boustrophedon.

Later correspondence between Barschius and Kirscher appears, according to Zandbergen 3. Barschius had sought out KirscherвЂ™s expertise due to his fame at the time for claiming to have, erroneously as it later transpired, deciphered the hieroglyphic writing system of the Ancient Egyptian language. The letter refers to a вЂњbook of mysterious steganographyвЂќ ( вЂњlibellumвЂ¦ вЂ¦steganographici mysterisiвЂќ) illustrated with pictures of plants, stars and chemical secrets that Kirscher had not yet had time to decipher. According to, which presents a far more detailed and thorough description of the research around the manuscript and its history than we could hope to offer here, the first extant mention of the manuscript can be found in a 1639 letter from Athanasius Kircher in Rome, replying to a letter forwarded from Georgius Barschius of Prague by the mathematician Theodor Moretus. Other supporting evidence has drawn from early mentions of the manuscript in correspondence. Radiocarbon dating in 2010 asserted that the manuscriptвЂ™s parchment likely dates from the early 15th century the volume of parchment in the manuscript, and its consistency across the document, make it unlikely, although not impossible, that the book is a modern-day hoax. The theory that the entire book is a hoax, either by contemporary scribes or by more modern players, has been raised repeatedly over the years. Since its discovery, and throughout the ongoing unsuccessful attempts to decipher its contents, many have questioned the authenticity of the Voynich Manuscript. We will crudely mimic some earlier results, and hopefully add our own confusion to the roiling mass of current research into the Voynich Manuscript.

The manuscript has been subjected to almost fifty years of furtive attempts by cryptographers, including the US National Security Agency and a menagerie of others from the distinguished to the deranged.

#Voynich manuscript for sale series

In this short series of posts we will subject the Voynich Manuscript to a range of text analysis techniques, delving into its structure, gain horrific insight into its composition, and skeptically assessing its credibility. The two-hundred or so folios of the manuscript, while beautifully illuminated, present a sadly limited corpus of text for the purposes of traditional analysis.

The manuscript has resisted all attempts at interpretation by cryptographers, historians, and linguists.ДЇrom a linguistic and cryptographic perspective, this lack of success in interpretation is not surprising. Written almost entirely in an unknown script, barring a small number of words apparently in Latin and High German, the manuscript is compellingly illustrated with depictions of plants, herbs, human figures, astronomical and astrological symbols. It now resides in YaleвЂ™s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library with the designation MS 408. The book passed through a number of other hands before being donated to Yale University by the noted rare book dealer Hans P. Following several fruitless years of attempts to decipher the manusript and discover its origin, or to interest others in it, Wilfrid Voynich died. The bookвЂ™s most recent history involves its purchase in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, a rare book dealer, from a sale of manuscripts by the Society of Jesus at the Villa Mondragone, Frascati. The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most well-known and studied volumes of occult knowledge. While the world abounds with strange phenomena ripe for analysis in their raw state, there is a peculiar pleasure in scrutinising arcane information curated and obscured by the human mind.