The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is a hand-written book that was made in Europe in the 1400’s. The mystery about it is that nobody understands the language in which it is written, and nobody has ever been able to read what it says. It is named after Alfred M. Voynich, an American collector of old books, who discovered it in 1912.

According the Wikipedia article about the Voynich manuscript, the book looks like an old medical handbook. Scholars think it must be that because of the pictures in it, and because the text seems to include recipes. They think it must have been written in some kind of secret code, but military code experts have tried to figure it out and have not been able to. Some people think that Voynich might have created the book himself as a hoax to make money, but scientific analysis of the book’s paper and ink shows that they must have been made more than 500 years ago.

I think that the book must have been the secret personal handbook of some early medical practitioner, maybe someone who mixed medicine with magic, as often happened at that time. If the book is partly about magic, that might have been one reason why the writer wanted it to be secret. But the writer must have been extremely clever to create a whole secret language that nobody has ever been able to read. The writer may have used some little-known language, one that is no longer spoken today, and then created an original code based on that, so there are two layers of secrecy.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_13.htm