Sometime between 1404 and 1438 — the period to which the University of Arizona's accelerator mass spectrometry laboratory carbon-dated four samples of its vellum in 2009 — someone, almost certainly in northern Italy, produced a 240-page illustrated manuscript in a script that no one before or since has been able to read. The codex is now held as MS 408 of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It is one of the most studied documents in existence. It has been examined by the leading cryptographers of two centuries — including the team at the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service that broke Japanese diplomatic codes in 1940 — and by the leading natural-language statisticians and machine-learning researchers of the present generation. Every claimed decipherment, of which there have been several dozen, has been rejected by the broader academic consensus. The script — colloquially 'Voynichese' — exhibits statistical patterns that resemble those of natural human languages while corresponding to no known language. The illustrations are recognizably medieval in style but depict, in their botanical sections, plants that match no identified species, and in their balneological sections, scenes of small naked female figures in green pools connected by what appear to be plumbing systems. The manuscript surfaced in the historical record in 1639 (a letter from a Bohemian alchemist to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher), disappeared again, and re-emerged in 1912 when the Polish-American bookseller Wilfrid Voynich purchased it from a Jesuit college near Rome. It has been at Yale since 1969. The Beinecke made it freely downloadable in 2020. The case file is mathematical, philological, and codicological. It is open in every sense.
Ancient & Historical Mysteries
ca 1420
