Mysterious Voynich book holds genuine message?
The world’s most mysterious medieval manuscript, which dates back to the early 1400s, may actually hold a genuine message, a new study has claimed.
The message inside the so-called Voynich book has eluded cryptographers, mathematicians and linguists for over a century. And for many, the book is assumed to be a hoax.
However, a new study, published in the journal Plos One, suggests the manuscript may, after all, hold a genuine message, BBC News reported. Scientists claim to have found linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful words within the text.
The book has been dated to the early 1400s, but it largely disappeared from public record until 1912 when an antique book dealer called Wilfrid Voynich bought it amongst a number of second-hand publications in Italy.
The book is 240 pages long, is written in an unknown alphabet and features mysterious pictures of unknown plants, astronomical images and naked women bathing.
Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, UK, believes his new research is one step closer to unravelling the mystery.
“The text is unique, there are no similar works and all attempts to decode any possible message in the text have failed. It’s not easy to dismiss the manuscript as simple nonsensical gibberish, as it shows a significant [linguistic] structure,” he said. Montemurro and a colleague used a computerised statistical method to analyse the text, an approach that has worked on other languages.
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