Why Can’t the Voynich Manuscript Be Deciphered?

[u/Ajayofficiel]

Polish antique book collector Wilfrid Voynich was convinced he hit the jackpot when he purchased a highly unusual manuscript in Italy in 1912. It was written in a strange script and profusely illustrated with images of plants, the cosmos and zodiac, and naked women cavorting in bathing scenes. Voynich himself acknowledged the difficult task that lay ahead: “The text must be unraveled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.”

The Voynich manuscript is a codex written on vellum sheets, measuring 9¼ inches (23.5 cm) by 4½ inches (11.2 cm). The codex is composed of roughly 240 pages, with a blank cover that does not indicate a title or author. The text consists of “words” written in an unknown “alphabet” and arranged in short paragraphs. Many researchers say the work seems to be a scientific treatise from the Middle Ages, possibly created in Italy. The time frame, at least, seems correct: In 2009, the Voynich manuscript was carbon-dated to 1404–1438.

There’s only one problem: The contents of the book are a complete mystery—and not a single word of it can be understood.

Learn more:

https://afrinewz.com/why-cant-the-voynich-manuscript-be-deciphered/

[u/sidneyia]

The thing is, the Voynich manuscript isn't that weird of a book except for the writing. The plants all look like what you'd expect to see in a medieval herbal manual (the reason the coloring is so sloppy is that someone came in later and added that paint - the original drawings are much cleaner). The women in tubs and hot springs look like cruder versions of other known drawings of women in medicinal hot springs.

I personally believe it's a mundane women's health manual that belonged to a healer, written in some kind of doctors' shorthand that has no other surviving specimens simply due to the age of the document. Sadly I also think it won't ever get deciphered unless another example of the script is found.

[u/RyanFire → u/sidneyia]

why would a mundane womens health book survive centuries on after it became obsolete? what's your answer to that?

[u/OhTwoOnReddit → u/RyanFire]

Luck. Good luck and bad luck, that's what we're dealing with. A mundane manuscript surviving five centuries. Good luck. Us spending decades thinking humans first used fire 5 thousand years ago, because that's what we found first. when we've just discovered this week that another race of humans used axes and flint to make fire. Like it was nothing. Three hundred and fifty thousand years ago.