The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded

[jimmy olsen]

Wrong!

Hm? Ok.

Wake me again when they translate the Voynich Manuscript.

It's gobbeltygook.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-has-finally-been-decoded/

The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded

History researcher says that it's a mostly plagiarized guide to women's health.

by Annalee Newitz - Sep 9, 2017 5:10am JST
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Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.
Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.


The mysterious medieval Voynich Manuscript is probably a women's health manual, according to history researcher Nicholas Gibbs.

Further study of the herbs and images in the book reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript's text and images had been plagiarized directly from them (they, in turn, were copied in part from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny, and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books were extremely rare, so nobody complained.

Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image—copied, of course, from another manuscript—of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)

The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume.

Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs' discovery makes it sound plausible.

See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here.

[Valmy]

Yeah right. We have seen this claim many times before.

[The Brain]

Yeah. Women's health manual is one of the stock interpretations, often made in imitation of Classical authors.

[Josquius]

A guide to womens health would sure match the alien imagery

[Razgovory]

The fact that the author doesn't explain some of the most salient questions regarding the book like "why is written using strange characters", or "what does it say", leads me to believe he hasn't decoded it at all.

[Habbaku]

Tim is fake news:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/experts-are-extremely-dubious-about-the-voynich-solution/

Last week, a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he'd cracked the code on the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.

As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations."
The weirdly-illustrated 15th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point.

However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They're not grammatically correct. It doesn't result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I'm a little surprised the TLS published it...If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat." The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs' claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages.

The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women's health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn't Gibbs' discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides.

Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, "I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running." Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel "documentaries," he might just get his wish.

[The Minsky Moment]

Assuming the book was written sometime in the early to mid 1400s - are the any other known books from that period that contain similar themes and drawings?

[The Brain]

Assuming the book was written sometime in the early to mid 1400s - are the any other known books from that period that contain similar themes and drawings?

Sicko.

[Valmy]

I saw this video a couple of years ago that claimed it was from the Sindh region of today's Pakistan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNm65v1thU

I don't know jack about Sindh but I did think the writing looked Indian so this appealed to my bias but since nothing ever came of it I assume it is just as much BS any other explanation

[celedhring]

I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.

[Drakken]

I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.

That it is a hoax or a book of nonsense, made to impress clients and marks, is the theory that best fits Occam's Razor, IMHO. This book was made to look occult and mysterious, not to be read and understood.

This is supported by the fact there is no correction whatsoever found in the document, nor any text squeezed because space was running out on the paper (which would be common in any original handwritten document before printing is invented). This means either it is a carefully handwritten copy of another document, or an original that is composed of gibberish of random letters and characters made up as the author(s) go along.

Also, analysis of each chapter's lexicographic patterns, structures, and hand writing suggests that two authors were involved. Each chapter is written fully in either style, referenced to "Voynich-A" and "Voynich-B". This implies that they were working together, because they were both, in fact, using the same script and alphabet system.

[The Brain]

I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.

That it is a hoax or a book of nonsense, made to impress clients and marks, is the theory that best fits Occam's Razor, IMHO.

Like the Bible?

[Drakken]

Like the Bible?

At least the Bible was meant to be intelligible to the priests who read it. This book was meant to be intelligible to no one, not even the authors. This remains to my mind the likeliest explanation: The medieval equivalent for occultists and astrologists to market their "expertise", like seeing books on Quantum Physics (TM) in a woo-woo doctor's library inside their office.

The "science" of cryptography in the XVth century was amateurish at best, so if there was a hidden language somewhere in it would have easily been decrypted by today's standards, with the power of our modern computers. That it is still not, suggests that this is not written in code.

However, that it would be a hoax does not mean that the authors have not put a lot of work in it. Great pains have been taken to create this document and make it look utterly credible. Quoting Brian Dunning on the Skeptoid Podcast:

The "complete nonsense" theory has one thing working against it. If it is nonsense, it's very good nonsense. It's almost too good to expect of an amateur.

Computational analysis of the text has been run, exhaustively, many times by many different researchers, using many different techniques. This allows us not only to try and translate it (at which all attempts have met utter failure), but also to compare its metrics to those of actual languages. The letter frequency, word length, and word frequency are very similar to what we see in real languages. But they don't quite match those of any real languages.

It's speculation, but I can imagine a monk or professional scribe who does this all the time being well aware of such things and deliberately giving the book a realistic appearance, but it seems less likely that an amateur, just a Joe Blow or professional from a different field, would happen to write gibberish that's such good gibberish.

[Razgovory]

I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.

That it is a hoax or a book of nonsense, made to impress clients and marks, is the theory that best fits Occam's Razor, IMHO.

Like the Bible?

Ooh, edgy.

[Admiral Yi]

I don't know jack about Sindh

I know one thing about Sindh.  When the British general Napier conquered the place he sent a one word dispatch back to headquarters: "peccavi."  Latin for "I have sinned."