• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Voynich manuscript decoded?

Is this the article?

My interpretation of the article, having read only a synopsis of it, is that the author is doing what so many others have done, using wishful thinking to substitute for real analysis.

What does it mean to have not a single other manuscript like this? Even if you find supposed similarities in characters, drawings, words and layouts with something else, you are faced with that fact, and that fact supports perfectly the idea of an invented, one of a kind, document.
IOW, a hoax, or to put it more kindly, a medieval Tolkien-like person who invented a language and script just for fun, and wrote a book in it? An argument against that is that that is a very expensive hobby - not in the 21st Century with laser printers in the home, but it was in the Middle Ages when vellum and colored inks cost a fortune.

Still, that would be no argument against decoding it, or being able to decode it. The hieroglyphics were decoded before anyone realized that Ancient Egyptian was a Semitic language. And plenty of languages have been decoded with a smaller corpus, measured in number of words or number of characters, than the single Voynich manuscript. Moreover, the Voynich manuscript covers a much more diverse topics, as suggested by the pictures, than many old script: e.g., the vast majority of the Linear B corpus is plain dry accounting of the goods in storage.

I don't quite get the part that Bax claims that he has decoded 14 characters. According to wiki:
While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.
Unless a substantial part of those characters he decoded are from the rare ones, shouldn't this give enough of a base to easily decode the rest?
 
IOW, a hoax, or to put it more kindly, a medieval Tolkien-like person who invented a language and script just for fun, and wrote a book in it? An argument against that is that that is a very expensive hobby - not in the 21st Century with laser printers in the home, but it was in the Middle Ages when vellum and colored inks cost a fortune.
Not an argument against the hoax theory. Music paper cost a fortune* years ago, too, but it didn't keep Mozart from writing operas, because he was (1) dedicated, (2) obsessed, and (3) often had rich benefactors.

Never underestimate the resources of those who want to fool you and have time on their hands or are just plain crazy.


* And you had to draw your own staff lines.
 
Not an argument against the hoax theory. Music paper cost a fortune* years ago, too, but it didn't keep Mozart from writing operas, because he was (1) dedicated, (2) obsessed, and (3) often had rich benefactors.
That's a bad comparison. For Mozart, writing music was his income. He sold those pieces, or wrote them on commission. He had to buy music paper like a carpenter has to buy a hammer and a chisel. The same holds for other composers. Many were outright employed as composer, such as J.S. Bach or Haydn; in fact, Mozart exemplifies the change of the trade from a composer as an employee at a court or church, to the composer as entrepreneur who sold his goods and services on the free market. See, e.g., On the Economics of Musical Composition in Mozart's Vienna.

By contrast, there is no single piece of evidence that the writer of the Voynich manuscript had any commercial incentive in writing it.

Never underestimate the resources of those who want to fool you and have time on their hands or are just plain crazy.
If we start with the supposition that the Voynich manuscript is written in a fictional language, there are still several scenarios possible.
a) a hoax to fool some others. However, unlike with Piltdown-man, I fail to see how it should have fooled someone. For one, what exposure would a single manuscript have in those days?
b) a hobby, someone who devised his own language and script and wrote a book in it; like if Tolkien had written "Lord of the Rings" in Quenya. I certainly wouldn't call such a person crazy.
c) to preserve or compile his knowledge in a certain field. Secrecy was common in science in those days. Not only alchemists were secret about their methods, but also mathematicians. For example, we now attribute the solution of cubic equations to Cardano, but he only published the method, its inventor was actually Tartaglia, who disclosed it to Cardano on condition of secrecy.
 
If we start with the supposition that the Voynich manuscript is written in a fictional language, there are still several scenarios possible.
a) a hoax to fool some others. However, unlike with Piltdown-man, I fail to see how it should have fooled someone. For one, what exposure would a single manuscript have in those days?
b) a hobby, someone who devised his own language and script and wrote a book in it; like if Tolkien had written "Lord of the Rings" in Quenya. I certainly wouldn't call such a person crazy.
c) to preserve or compile his knowledge in a certain field. Secrecy was common in science in those days. Not only alchemists were secret about their methods, but also mathematicians. For example, we now attribute the solution of cubic equations to Cardano, but he only published the method, its inventor was actually Tartaglia, who disclosed it to Cardano on condition of secrecy.
All those are possible. But you left out
  • Someone with time on their hands
  • A commissioned work
  • A hobby of someone who fantasizes a lot (Tolkien wrote his fantasy in novel form, someone else might use art)
Think how many hoaxes we have today, using YouTube. Why does someone do this? Not (always) to make money; they don't directly interact with their victims and some hoaxes are quite elaborate. By your reasoning, there would be no April Fool's Day, since you won't admit there doesn't have to be a reason for a prank.

The same thing can be said about some virus and malware writers, especially early ones, before it became so commercial. Why would someone go to the trouble to write a virus? They don't directly benefit except to chuckle over the havoc they cause.

For that matter, why do people write and edit Wikipedia? There's no money in it. About the only benefit is -- sort of the reverse of virus writers -- the satisfaction of doing something useful for others you do not see.

I had a grandmother I used to visit often. She had a nice piano, and said she played it all the time. The sheet music I saw was difficult. But I never heard her play, and she refused to play when anyone else was present, even a close relative. Why? Because she played for her own enjoyment and nothing else. She created art and deliberately kept it hidden.

You cannot underestimate what humans will do for no apparent reason. Why do people paint on canvas for a hobby? Many hours are spent with no monetary reward. I know people who collect frog sculptures. It costs them money, and it's hard to see what benefit anyone gets from it, but it pleases them, and that's the only reason they need. It's entirely possible the Voynich author never expected anyone to see his handiwork, or only his benefactor.

I like the comparison to Tolkien a lot. Both Middle Earth and Voynich show worlds with considerable similarities to our world, but they are not exactly like our world. Tolkien was supposedly influenced by the World Wars and he was an English literature professor. He blended his knowledge of these fields with a coherent fantasy, complete with language and genetics (hobbits, dwarves, elves, dragons).

Voynich seems influenced by botany and chemistry (more likely, alchemy). It looks like a blend of the known with fantasy, complete with language, and internally consistent.

Imagine what we might make of Tolkien if all we had from him was the literary works without explanation or knowledge of his life. We might argue just as you do -- too much work for a hobby, so hobbits must be real, or "to preserve or compile his knowledge in a certain field."
 
Only if you already knew the meanings of the rest of the words or the sounds of the rest of the letters or what language it's in. Otherwise, all you get for most of the rest of the document is something like this:

W_ts ____ pr_m __on cr___l_ ___ omp_

...times a few thousand... in some language from among multiple times more candidate languages than anybody could ever be familiar with.
 
The hieroglyphics were decoded before anyone realized that Ancient Egyptian was a Semitic language.
The ancient Egyptian language was well known to scholars, and to Egyptian Christian priests, in the nineteenth century. But it was written in Greek letters. It was the script that was unknown. The language itself wasn't a problem. See wiki on the Coptic language.
Coptic and Demotic Egyptian are grammatically closely akin to Late Egyptian, which was written in the Hieroglyphic script. Coptic flourished as a literary language from the 2nd to 13th centuries, and its Bohairic dialect continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the early modern period, though revitalization efforts have been underway since the 19th century.
 
The hieroglyphics were decoded before anyone realized that Ancient Egyptian was a Semitic language.

Sorry, the linguist in me (I never professionally used the degree) feels the need to correct this widespread misconception. Egyptian (there's no need to add 'Ancient', since there's no Modern Egyptian) is not a Semitic language. It is part of what is now called the Afro-Asiatic language family, which in the past used to be called the Hamito-Semitic languages. But that family has several branches, one of them being Semitic. Egyptian sits on its own entirely separate branch. So it is only related the the Semitic languages in the same way that, say, English, is related to the Slavic languages, since they both belong to the Indo-European language family. That doesn't make English a Slavic language.

One of the reasons the 'Hamito-Semitic' label was dropped was exactly that it strongly suggested that the Semitic languages were somehow the ancestor languages of the group, and more important than the other branches (in the sense that Latin is the ancestor language of all the Romance languages).
 
Not an argument against the hoax theory. Music paper cost a fortune* years ago, too, but it didn't keep Mozart from writing operas, because he was (1) dedicated, (2) obsessed, and (3) often had rich benefactors.

Never underestimate the resources of those who want to fool you and have time on their hands or are just plain crazy.

* And you had to draw your own staff lines.

As your footnote really points out, music paper as such didn't exist at all. All paper was expensive, whatever you wrote or printed on it, and it became increasingly expensive throughout the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. That was because of ever-increasing demand (rising literacy, ever more books and newspapers being printed), and a fairly stagnant supply of the raw material: rags from discarded old clothes, which only increased roughly proportional to population growth. That's why from the nineteenth century onward, people started looking for other stuff to make paper from, and finally came up with wood pulp paper, the stuff we nowadays think of as "paper" (with paper money being the only thing in widespread use still being printed on textile-fibre based paper in most of the world). But for a composer, paper was just a necessary tool of the trade, so however expensive, its price was included in the remuneration payed by whoever ordered the music (be that a steady employer, or someone ordering just a single piece.)
 
Last edited:
I think it's one of history's greatest troll jobs.

The most likely explanation for the Voynich manuscript I have ever read (and no, I can't remember on what website that was, it may even have been here on JREF), is that is actually what the author called an "alchemist's herbal". Or, in other words, an imposter's prop: a book meant to look mysterious and learned and full of important secret knowledge, which someone trying to pass himself of as possessing such knowledge could use to impress potential marks. He could open it during a session, leaf through it pretending to consult it, let the mark get enough glances at the illustrated pages at the beginning to impress him with their mysteriousness, etc. That would also explain why it would have been a pretty expensive thing to produce, because of the price of vellum: it had to look the part of a very important book, despite just being gibberish. Also, to me that hypothesis explains why only the front section is heavily illustrated, and the later pages are just text. That could be just filler material - making sure that if someone accidentally got a glance at one of those pages they could see they weren't blank, and filled with the same mysterious writing as the rest of the book, but without having to go to the trouble of filling the *whole* thing with the elaborate illustrations that are at the front.

In summary: the Voynich manuscript as a prop created and used by a professional fraud.
 
The most likely explanation for the Voynich manuscript I have ever read (and no, I can't remember on what website that was, it may even have been here on JREF), is that is actually what the author called an "alchemist's herbal". Or, in other words, an imposter's prop: a book meant to look mysterious and learned and full of important secret knowledge, which someone trying to pass himself of as possessing such knowledge could use to impress potential marks. He could open it during a session, leaf through it pretending to consult it, let the mark get enough glances at the illustrated pages at the beginning to impress him with their mysteriousness, etc. That would also explain why it would have been a pretty expensive thing to produce, because of the price of vellum: it had to look the part of a very important book, despite just being gibberish. Also, to me that hypothesis explains why only the front section is heavily illustrated, and the later pages are just text. That could be just filler material - making sure that if someone accidentally got a glance at one of those pages they could see they weren't blank, and filled with the same mysterious writing as the rest of the book, but without having to go to the trouble of filling the *whole* thing with the elaborate illustrations that are at the front.

In summary: the Voynich manuscript as a prop created and used by a professional fraud.

I think this is probably the explanation. I said the same thing on Facebook this morning. So it must be true!

It makes a lot of sense to me.
 
I think this is probably the explanation. I said the same thing on Facebook this morning. So it must be true!

It makes a lot of sense to me.

Are there other examples of "prop books" used historically in such a manner? It would make a stronger case if this wasn't the only example of such a thing. (Not being argumentative, I really don't know if there are others.)
 
Are there other examples of "prop books" used historically in such a manner? It would make a stronger case if this wasn't the only example of such a thing. (Not being argumentative, I really don't know if there are others.)

Well according to our ever reliable friend wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#Alchemy_in_Medieval_Europe
There is little to suggest that Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), a Dominican, was himself an alchemist. In his authentic works such as the Book of Minerals, he observed and commented on the operations and theories of alchemical authorities like Hermes and Democritus, and unnamed alchemists of his time. Albertus critically compared these to the writings of Aristotle and Avicenna, where they concerned the transmutation of metals. From the time shortly after his death through to the 15th century, twenty-eight or more alchemical tracts were misattributed to him, a common practice giving rise to his reputation as an accomplished alchemist.[58] Likewise, alchemical texts have been attributed to Albert's student Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

Fake Alchemical texts seems to have been a common thing at the time.

The Voynich manuscript is just a lot fancier than any other one and more mysterious, because it is written in a "Secret Language"...

But I'm no expert.
 
Last edited:
Well according to our ever reliable friend wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#Alchemy_in_Medieval_Europe


Fake Alchemical texts seems to have been a common thing at the time.

The Voynich manuscript is just a lot fancier than any other one and more mysterious, because it is written in a "Secret Language"...

But I'm no expert.

A misattributed text seems like a different animal, and we know now that, in a sense, all alchemy texts are "fake." But I don't think these count as "prop texts" in the way we mean here, with the secret writing and all.

Is it more likely that a prop text would be preserved, thinking it valuable, or less likely, if you know it's meaningless?
 
A misattributed text seems like a different animal, and we know now that, in a sense, all alchemy texts are "fake." But I don't think these count as "prop texts" in the way we mean here, with the secret writing and all.

I cannot think of specifically this kind of prop book being used, the Voynich is indeed unique. But then, the other explanations offered for its creation don't seem to have other similar examples either. And it fits a pattern that frauds and imposters have used through the ages. Pronouncing magical formulas in a made-up language for instance, could be thought of as a verbal equivalent, but much less laborious to produce. Simply reading out random Latin texts pretending they're magical incantations of some kind, knowing your audience doesn't know any Latin has also been known to be used. And of course, in more recent years, there are plenty of examples of fake supposedly scientific devices, usually with medical purposes, for instance just boxes with some knobs and switches on the outside, and some wiring and maybe some electronic components inside, that do absolutely nothing. Those fake bomb detector devices (as used in Irag), also sold as drug detectors, are another example. Those could be thought of as a sort of modern-day Voynich-as-a-prop equivalent: something designed to just *look* like it might be an actual working electronic device to a gullible layman.

Somewhat tangentially, I can think of two examples of 'prop books' with meaningless or no content being used to deceive the public, but innocently.

One is the tradition of Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) in the Low Countries. When Sinterklaas arrives from Spain, by steamer of course, he brings with him a big book, which has the names of all children in it, and whether they have been good or bad that year. If they've been bad, they will be punished by his servant, Zwarte Piet, otherwise they'll get a present. So it's part of the ritual of some Sinterklazen (to use the Dutch plural) to ask children their name, then either ask Zwarte Piet to look up the name or ponderously consult the book himself. Mysteriously, it always turns out the child has been good and gets a present. Of course, in this case most of the target audience is too young to read, and never gets a good look at what's on the pages, but it needs to be a big, impressive-looking bound volume (after all, *all* children are listed in it). I've seen several different books used for the purpose. Large-format Bibles do very well, as they also often have a cross embossed on the front, which matches the one on Sinterklaas' mitre (sadly, some Sinterklazen these days use crossless mitres, which just isn't right). But I've also seen big dictionaries (language irrelevant) used, and on one occasion the collected works of William Shakespeare. As long as you cover up too-obvious words on the cover, and it looks as though the pages are covered with lots of information, it works fine.

The second example is the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1953, which formed the European Economic Community, later to evolve into the European Union. The treaty was actually negotiated and agreed on in Brussels, but for symbolic reasons the official signing was to be in Rome (very consciously to bring up associations with the Roman Empire). The problem was that the time between the agreement and the signing ceremony was so short, the Italian state printers who had to produce the lavish bound presentation copies of the treaty didn't have the time to typeset, print and bind them. So what they did was produce essentially blank books, except for a title page, a page with a hastily-written "Preamble", so the books could be opened to those in front of the cameras to pretend it contained the treaty, and the pages at the end, where the signatures of the six heads of government would go. So in the footage where you see those "treaties" being solemnly opened, presented to each signatory in turn and passed around until everyone has signed all the copies, they're all signing shams, just a bundle of blank pages. (The real treaty existed only in a typewritten version with carbon copies.) I don't know if they later produced versions with the actual treaty in it, and discreetly sent them round the member states for a second signing, or what happened to those original empty versions (maybe they simply unbound them and replaced the blank pages with properly printed ones). But what if hundreds of years later, someone with no knowledge of how this came about or about the general historical background, found one of those original books: a title page claiming a "Treaty", a vaguely-worded preamble, and then hundreds of blank pages, except for the last few pages, which contain the names and signatures of six heads of government, wouldn't he also think he had a major mystery book on his hands, instead of an innocent prop only intended to look like a treaty for the cameras?
 
The BBC Radio programme From Our Own Correspondent had a bit on this. The correspondent stated that Voynich had been confirmed as a faker on some other artifact.

He also pointed out that the vellum could indeed be old (which it is from carbon dating) but the ink could be new
 
The BBC Radio programme From Our Own Correspondent had a bit on this. The correspondent stated that Voynich had been confirmed as a faker on some other artifact.

He also pointed out that the vellum could indeed be old (which it is from carbon dating) but the ink could be new

I found the story here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26881734

I haven't downloaded the podcast of the actual broadcast yet, but if it's identical to the website text, it contains nothing about Voynich having been confirmed as a faker. It merely states the reporter's own hypothesis: "I believe that having forged the manuscript, Voynich then did what numerous other forgers have done - create a second document to validate the first and give it a plausible provenance." But that "second document" is just the letter, dated much later, appended to the manuscript since it surfaced. Yes, that could be a forgery, even one by Voynich - but AFAIK that remains as unproven as the actual manuscript being a forgery by Voynich himself.

Maybe I should add that everything I've said before does hinge on the assumption that the VM does indeed date from the time to which the vellum was carbon-dated. If it was indeed proven to be a 20th century forgery, by Voynich or someone else, everything else obviously goes out of the window. But what extremely competent forger of old texts only ever forges ONE document during their life? And I haven't been able to find anything about Voynich being linked to any dubious or forged documents elsewhere. The text on the BBC website certainly doesn't contain any such information. Just an allegation.

ETA: The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 (but I cannot edit the post in which I said it was 1953). And if you're interested, there's a clip on Youtube of this solemn signing of big bundles of blank paper. Just search on "treaty of rome signing".
 
Last edited:
In order for the found phonetic correspondences between pictured plant names to have arisen from a trick, the nature of the truck must have been phonetic substitution using a made-up alphabet to spell real names/words, in which case there still is really a phonetic system to work out and meaningful content to read anyway, even if the alphabet has never been used elsewhere.
 
I found the story here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26881734

I haven't downloaded the podcast of the actual broadcast yet, but if it's identical to the website text, it contains nothing about Voynich having been confirmed as a faker. It merely states the reporter's own hypothesis: "I believe that having forged the manuscript, Voynich then did what numerous other forgers have done - create a second document to validate the first and give it a plausible provenance." But that "second document" is just the letter, dated much later, appended to the manuscript since it surfaced. Yes, that could be a forgery, even one by Voynich - but AFAIK that remains as unproven as the actual manuscript being a forgery by Voynich himself.

Maybe I should add that everything I've said before does hinge on the assumption that the VM does indeed date from the time to which the vellum was carbon-dated. If it was indeed proven to be a 20th century forgery, by Voynich or someone else, everything else obviously goes out of the window. But what extremely competent forger of old texts only ever forges ONE document during their life? And I haven't been able to find anything about Voynich being linked to any dubious or forged documents elsewhere. The text on the BBC website certainly doesn't contain any such information. Just an allegation.

ETA: The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 (but I cannot edit the post in which I said it was 1953). And if you're interested, there's a clip on Youtube of this solemn signing of big bundles of blank paper. Just search on "treaty of rome signing".

I only caught the end bit in the car, and have little/no further knowledge or opinion on this - I was hoping someone would know more about the other alleged fakes, which were implied to be fairly well-accepted as fakes.

As you say, if it has been partially decoded, it would seem rather a lot of effort for a fake. Using old vellum would have been perfectly understandable, even if it was a 19th Century fake as that way one doesn't need to resort to chemical methods to age it, and those probably could have been detectable in the 19th century.
 

Back
Top Bottom