11: The Voynich Manuscript Decoded - Have We Finally Solved the Most Mysterious Book in the World?
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For 600 years, the Voynich manuscript has stumped scholars, cryptographers, physicists, computer scientists, pretty much everybody. Now, a researcher in Germany has claimed to have finally decoded the most mysterious book in the world. He did. What's it say? Well, welcome to the Y files where smart folks like us come to laugh and learn. Have the secrets of the Voynich manuscript finally been revealed? Well, a German Egyptologist claims he solved it. Has he?

He thinks so. First, some background. The Voynich manuscript is a 240 page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language full of bizarre drawings of strange plants, astrological symbols and lots and lots of naked women.

Oh, is there a centerfold? Actually, there is. Spicy! The Voynich manuscript defies classification and has also defied comprehension. Everybody's taken a shot at this. Cryptologists, FBI operatives, respected medievalists, mathematic and scientific scholars, skilled linguists. They've all been left stumped. Even Alan Turing took a crack at it and came up short. I'm so sorry.

A book written in an unknown language no one has been able to decode, with crumbling pages made of bound calfskin dating back to the 15th century, you'd probably picture something out of a Nicolas Cage movie. What you might not picture is a book filled with whimsical illustrations of nude women in bathtubs, bathtubs with windows, bathtubs shaped like ovaries, bathtubs oozing green liquid, bathtubs, bathtubs...

bathtubs everywhere. These, along with drawings of star shaped flowers and wild green vines, they're all kind of tucked inside the pages. The mysterious book has been divided into sections by historians, herbal, astrological, pharmacological and biological, biological.

The study of balls? The study of baths. Ah, that makes more sense. The herbal section is thick with elaborate drawings of unrecognized plants. They're twisted and spiky with dripping leaves and wide petals. And one drawing, there's some kind of reptilian sea creature who looks like a mix between a dragon and a seahorse is chewing on one of the leaves. Looks like whoever made this book was also making funny tea with those plants. That

would that would answer some questions in the astrological section. Pages fold out into massive charts of the night sky with complicated constellations intertwined with doodles of naked women holding stars and emerging from tubes. Well, wait, is this the centerfold you were talking about? Yeah. No mermaids and nothing.

Nope. Bit of a letdown. You need a girlfriend. Well, let's go to the store and pick one out. That's not a healthy way to start a relationship. If she doesn't work out, we'll exchange it for a new one. You can't do that. Right, right, right, right. How many times have you said you'd like to trade your wife in for a new one? No, no, no, no, no.

Some say the astrological part is the book's most translatable section. It features constellations like Pisces, Taurus and Sagittarius, but they're a little bit off. And the Balneological section is by far the most bizarre. You've got naked women floating, swimming, drowning and resting in all kinds of baths. And the baths are cake shaped baths or holes in the ground, winding river like pipes and baths shaped like a woman's reproductive system.

This section is the most famous in the manuscript, and it's easy to see why people have wondered for centuries why the author was so fascinated with women in bathtubs. This is giving me some ideas for a new fishbowl design. Nope, don't even go to you at blowing glass. Oh, I'm not blowing anything for you. The last section, the pharmacological section is almost all text in Boina cheese is going to cheese made by cows or goats. Technically, it was made by a man.

I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me? Yeah. Voynichese is written from left to right. And although it's never been officially deciphered, there's definitely a structure to it. Researchers have concluded that the language has 20 to 25 distinct letters, but nobody's been able to figure out how the letters fit together. According to cryptanalyst Elizabeth Friedman in 1962, anyone who attempts to translate it is doomed to utter frustration. Same goes for trying to understand a YouTube algorithm. Can't argue with that.

Theories about the Voynich manuscript are all over the place. Some think the book was written by philosophers in a secret code only they can understand. But my favorite theory is aliens. Yep.

Yep, if you Google Voynich plus aliens, you get all kinds of great stuff because it contains a language that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet. And given the fact that the ancient manuscript depicts star charts that are unknown to us, the Voynich manuscript could have been created by a being not from Earth who during the fourteen hundreds crash landed here, knowing that humans didn't have the necessary technology to help them return to his planet. Maybe the alien visitor decided to chronicle his remaining life on Earth inside the manuscript.

E.T.'s coloring book. Oh, I love the Internet. After hundreds of years of failed attempts to translate it, no theory was really off the table. But this June, one man claimed to have cracked the code once and for all. According to German Egyptologist Rainer Hanegg, Boina cheese is actually based in Hebrew. He concluded that the text must be a Semitic language. And given the European imagery in the book's illustrations, he narrowed the options to Arabic

Aramaic or Hebrew, which were languages spoken by the European scholars of the Middle Ages. After identifying a connection between certain Voynich characters in Hebrew, he managed to translate the first few words and then full sentences. It will be years, Hanek says, before the full manuscript will be translated. So

What's it say? Mostly gibberish. Experts in ancient Hebrew are not convinced that Haneg cracked anything. They've poked more than a few holes in his translation and said he's taken quite a few liberties with the language to try to derive meaning where it just doesn't exist. I'm wrong again!

wrong about us. Over the past few decades, at least 60 Voynich solutions have been published. So far, all of them have been debunked. In 2019, David Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol in England, thought the book was written in a language lost to time, a predecessor to modern English and Spanish. He told Romance Studies

When I realized the magnitude of the achievement, it was like a eureka moment. And Cheshire's news hit the media like a tsunami and was debunked with the same amount of force botched research and a rush to publication added up to a pretty embarrassing mess. And as stated in Ars Technica after the fallout, another day, another dubious claim that someone has decoded the Voynich manuscript.

In 2017, television writer Nicholas Gibbs made international news when he claimed to have solved the mystery. Gibbs believed that the book is a women's health manual and the language is actually made up of Latin abbreviations. Now, the women's health book theory might hold some merit. I mean, why else would you doodle ovaries in a bunch of fallopian tubes? Unless you're Jackie Treehorn.

And Lebowski fans get it. But the Latin abbreviation idea was less convincing. Latin experts found his translations to be pretty much nonsense. This wasn't too much of a shock. Gibbs didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with. He was studying the text for a television show and lacked real experience in historical text decoding. So TV producers think they know everything.

Even the Hebrew theory has been brought up and shut down before. In 2016, two computer scientists announced that they had successfully translated the entire sentences of the book from Hebrew. How did they test their theory? Well, they typed every Hebrew letter they recognized into Google Translate. According to their findings, the first sentence of the manuscript reads, She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people seems legit.

It wasn't. Hebrew experts reviewed this work and said the translation wasn't even close. Now, while the language of the Voynich manuscript remains unknown, the book's history is slightly less mysterious, although there's still a few hundred years not accounted for. Historians at the University of Arizona have carbon dated the book to the 15th century between 1404 and 1438, and clues such as the style of the illustrations, the type of pigments and paints used and the calfskin that the text was written on all indicated

probably originated in northern Italy. The voyage first appears in the historical record in the late 16th century when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second purchased the book and the imperial physician's signature is visible on the first page of the text. So we know he probably had it. It then passed into the hands of George Barresque, an alchemist from Prague who referred to the book as a certain riddle of the Sphinx that was uselessly taking up space.

When Baresk's heir inherited the manuscript, he sent it to an Egyptian hieroglyphics expert in Rome for help decoding the text. Did he decode it? He did not. He said it couldn't be cracked. Oh, Megan.

Well, they weren't kidding. The manuscript then disappeared for 250 years, finally resurfacing when it was purchased by Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. And Voynich dedicated his life to deciphering it. And eventually the book was named after him. For a time, some people believe that Voynich himself wrote the manuscript, hoping to sell the medieval mystery for a lot of money. But

Carbon dating proved this theory impossible. The book was eventually donated to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it remains today, capturing imaginations, igniting curiosities and fueling controversies.

While historians and cryptologists, linguists and scientists continue their search for the Voynich manuscripts, meaning the most logical theory to me is that it was a hoax perpetrated on Emperor Rudolph by Edward Kelly, a medieval scam artist. Kelly would go into these trances where he claimed to be able to speak to angels and other people would then write down what the angels said in their angel language. Other people spoke this angel language. No, there was

What do they write down? Just, you know, nonsense. That is not at all helpful. It's not. If the manuscript really is a transcription of one of these angel sessions, decoding it is going to be tricky. Do angels even have a language? Oh, some people in the comments are going to insist they do. You'll see. So the best cryptographers are stumped. Computer scientists and all their tools have gotten nowhere. And experts in ancient languages have all hit dead ends. I guess all we have left to do is wait for an angel.

We were awaiting your arrival. Thanks for hanging out with us today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything today, do us a favor. Hit the thumbs up button. It really helps out the channel. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.