Imagine a book written in an unknown alphabet, in an unknown language, at an unknown date and place. Could such a book be read? Could one retrieve the information it contains, if any? This is not a trivial question and it has baffled historians and scientists alike for most part of this century…
In 1912, the antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich bought a number of medieval manuscripts from an undisclosed location in Europe. Among these was a lavishly illustrated manuscript codex of 234 pages, written in an unknown script.
Voynich took the MS to the United States and started a campaign to have it deciphered. Now, almost 100 years later, the Voynich manuscript still stands as probably the most elusive puzzle in the world of cryptography. Not a single word of this ‘Most Mysterious Manuscript’, written probably in the second half of the 15th Century, can be understood.
Nature magazine reports that it may be a hoax.
