May 7, 2014 • 26 mins
Our ongoing update series covers a more recent topic: Even though our Voynich Manuscript episode was just a little more than a year ago, the inscrutable book has been in the news a lot since then. What are the latest theories? Read the show notes here.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class is
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web starts with your website. Welcome to you, Stuff you
(00:22):
Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly from and we are continuing and doing some
updates because I am being a slacker and taking time
to not be at work for a little while, and
(00:46):
so we're updating some of our previous episodes to keep
things going in my absence. Uh. And this is actually
an update to an episode that Holly and I recorded together,
which is the we You know, most of our stuff
is within the last twelve months, and so there's not
often a need to update things. Uh. Not so with
the Voyage Manuscript, which has had multiple needs for updates
(01:08):
since it originally came out. Yeah, this came out originally
in March, which is a little more than a year ago,
so the Voyage Manuscript. If you missed out on that episode,
it's a two forty page book full of illustrations and
a seemingly indecipherable text. Lots and lots of people wrote
to us after that episode originally came out, reminding us
(01:29):
of the x K c D comic that implies that
it was the equivalent of a fifteenth century Dungeons and
Dragons manual. I do love x K C D. I
had just forgotten that too, So Yeah, however, there have
been other new developments. Yeah, and the first two months
of two completely different teams came up with two completely
(01:53):
different theories about the manuscript, and both of them were
kind of allegedly build as breakthroughs. Yes, we're both of them.
We got many, many many emails and tweets and Facebook
notes from people saying they've cracked the Voyage Manuscript, and
we were sort of like, which one are you talking
about again? Didn't that just happened three weeks ago. The
(02:15):
first of these is on January, and that's when the
American Botanical Council published a paper in its peer reviewed journal,
which is called Herbal Graham. This was written by botanist
Dr Arthur O. Tucker as well as Rexford H. Talbot,
and the paper focused on the manuscripts botanical illustrations instead
of doing what a lot of people do, which is
(02:36):
a straight up sign trying to decipher the text. The
two compared the illustrations to ones from other manuscripts that
had existed at about the same time that the Voyage
Manuscript was first discovered, and they found an illustration that
looked very similar to a soap plant that was shown
in the Mexican codex Cruise Bodyanus so using this as
a starting point, they reportedly identified thirty seven plants, six animals,
(03:00):
and one mineral from the Voyage Manuscript that also appeared
in Central and South American texts, and from there they
worked up a theory that this manuscript is in an
extinct dialect of a Mexican indigenous language known as the Wattle.
And then on February fourteenth, so we're talking about less
than a month later, the University of Bedfordshire announced that
(03:22):
Stephen Backs, professor of Applied Linguistics, had cracked the code
on the Voyage Manuscript. In his approach and conclusions were
completely different, except that he had also started with the
plants right. He looked at medieval manuscripts in Arabic and
other languages and started trying to identify the plants and
the voyage manuscript based on the plants and these other texts,
(03:45):
And once he had pinned down some of the plant's
probable names, he started working on deciphering the text, kind
of using those plant names as the key. I were
like the Rosetta stone for his right thing. Uh. And
based on this work, Backs claim that he decoded about
ten words in fourteen signs and clusters, and he theorized
that the manuscript is a coded version of a Near
(04:07):
Eastern or Asian language. So again, too, they can't both
be right. They could be both right if the text
is not entirely in one language, like that's the only
way they would work. If it's one text written in
multiple languages, that would work. But we got so many
notes from people who were so excited and so hopeful,
(04:27):
and I hate to burst the bubble, but at the
same time, this definitely seemed like something we should take
the opportunity to update. So let's take a moment for
a word from our sponsor before we turn you back
over to us to talk to you from the past
about what we talked about with the Voyage Manuscript before. Okay,
(04:52):
here here's our original from back in marchisode on the
Voyage Manuscript. They were going to talk about one of
those great history mystery that's persisted for hundreds of years,
(05:12):
which I always love those, because you know, once it's
it just remains a mystery for x amount of time.
It's just probably always going to be a mystery. And
even if it gets solved, I think there will always
be detractors, which makes it kind of well and I
it's one of those things that I always am a
little bit annoyed at the unsolved mystery because I wanted
to know the real story. I don't know that we
ever can because there will never probably be an accepted
(05:35):
version of the real story by every universally accepted. Yes,
there would have to be some kind of new discovery
on this one, I think so, yes. But well, we're
talking about today is a document called the Voytage Manuscript.
You may or may not have heard of it. Some
uh sort of code breaking fans have have done a
lot of study on it. Some historians are really into it.
(05:56):
But what it is is a book that no one
can read, Yes, is in an unknown language? Yes. Most
people consider it to be a cipher text of some
sort perhaps, um. It could be that it could also
be nonsense. Uh. There are the outliers that like to
(06:16):
say Aliens brought it, but there's some scientific evidence that
that is not really the case. Um. So for some
basic background on it. It's actually named after a fairly
modern person, Wilfred Voynage, who was an anti Korean bookseller
that acquired the text in UM. He was Polish American
and he found it in a Jesuit library near Rome
(06:38):
and purchased it there. Two forty pages long and written
in an unknown text. It's kind of pretty and loopy
to look at. It is a very curly, it's flowing script.
It's very pretty um and colorful. Yes, it's currently how
is that um yale And we'll talk about that a
little bit later. But they have this great descriptor in
(07:00):
here UM page about it, where it says it is
drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue,
and red. And it just sounds so sweet and quaint
the way they describe it as this, And when you
look at it, it's both quaint and weird because it's
illustrated throughout. There are a hundred and thirteen unidentified plant
species drawn in there, astronomical and astrological drawings. There are
(07:23):
basically drawings of some sort of like the botanical slash
scientific variety on almost every page of the thing, um,
some of which is not immediately recognizable as no there.
That's one of the ways that people have tried to
approach it, is by identifying some of the plant life
that's drawn in it and trying to backwards engineer that way,
(07:43):
but that hasn't really panned out. Um. There are also
some interesting female nudes in it. Yes, Uh, it's interesting.
I looked at some of these pictures and I couldn't tell.
They all have swollen abdomens. But I can't tell if
it's trying to depict pregnancy or just the more the
round body type that has been popular throughout history at
(08:04):
certain points. It's a little bit hard to know for sure. Well,
I love the Yale description of it. Miniature female nudes,
most with swelled abdomens, immersed or waiting in fluids and
oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules. Yeah, I think
that's part of what has caused people to want to
(08:24):
attribute it to alien origin. It is a little bit
it's odd, it's a little bit freaky. It's odd, and
just from that description brings up sort of connotations of
weird fertility, something strangeness. Yeah, people being strung together. It's
it's a little bit weird. There are also nine cosmological
medallions and they're many of those are huge, and they're
(08:47):
drawn across um folded folio pages and in some cases
they may be depicting geographical elements, but it's not again
always clear. We haven't correcked this. And then medicinal herbs
and roots, which are considered separate from the plant species.
(09:07):
And there's no byline. No, we don't know who wrote it,
which is part of the mystery. So it is currently
housed at Yale University in the UH I believe it's
pronounced by Nicki Rare Book and Manuscript Library and it's
listed as MS four oh eighty. There's a pretty cool
page at Yale that that gives more information about it,
and we will link to it from the shore notes
(09:28):
we have started doing with this podcast. Would like to
have a look at a more detail about what it
looks like and what's in there. Yeah, they did a
wonderful job of breaking down and describing really every element
of the book UM from a you know, an unbiased,
pretty neutral standpoint, just kind of I once worked in
(09:48):
a library as doing acquisitions and cataloging assistance. So they're
perfect basically is what I'm saying. They're cataloging UM is
like an ideal for and that you would catalog something
that you don't understand, right it is. It is a
very fascinating read. There is also linked from there a
chemical analysis of the book itself and what the pages
(10:10):
are made of and what the anks are made of. Yeah,
which is what kind of uh squelches any of those
alien origin theories where they're identified elements from our planet. Yes,
and we have also scientifically, we being other researchers, identified
the approximately when it was created. There was a two
thousand nine University of Arizona project. Researchers carbendated it to
(10:34):
the early half of the fifteenth century, so there's a
probability that it was written between fourteen of four and
fourteen thirty eight. I mean, that's the basic description of it.
So then we're kind of onto what is this thing.
I don't know, and everybody has theories, and because it's
never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might be the
right one. Um. Some people think it could be a
(10:57):
book of secrets, like it's alchemy or another secret knowledge,
and that it is in fact a medieval cipher text
that is intended to hide and prevent others from getting
this secret knowledge. Uh. Some have even suggested that it's
actually a record of inventions and discoveries of Roger Bacon,
who was a friar and scholar in the u but
(11:20):
that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah, that was a
very circumstantial thing of there are things in here that
he was interested in, so maybe he made this and
that's Yeah, there's definitely a lot of circumstantial evidence around
all of it. Every theory about it, the remnant of
an ancient language theory doesn't really hold a lot of water.
It's one of those things that when you hear linguist
(11:42):
experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when
you first look at it, it looks like something we
should be able to read. It looks like a text,
it looks like you know, an alphabet. But the deeper
they get into it, the more they realize they can't.
It becomes sort of more a usaid of the more
they study it. And that's one of those ideas that's
(12:03):
pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There are definitely
written languages that we have not been able to decipher
until we have found some other texts that has led
us decipher it. So I think that's one of those
ideas that hasn an allure to it, but that has
not really panned out. Yeah, And one of the one
of the things that kind of discounts that theory is
(12:25):
that normally in any language, the most common words are
normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just like in
English it would be you know, your articles, articles, prepositions, etcetera.
They tend to be compact, short little words, and in
this particular document, the most common words tend to be
very long and sort of complicated in comparison to the rest,
(12:45):
which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
one of the things that um people who are fond
of the Gibberish theory like to cite like this doesn't
make sense as a language. It's probably not, and people
have been trying to decrypt it since at least the
sixteen hundreds. We know, uh, even in World War Two
(13:07):
army codebreakers were just sort of taking a crack at
it on the side, and they couldn't make heads nor
tails of it. They couldn't really like even get you know,
sort of a toe hold in to be like, oh,
we think we might know, we have no idea. Again,
that almost seems suspicious to me that nobody, in four
hundred plus years of trying to analyze this document could
(13:29):
really get any sort of positive affirmation that they were
on the right track. They all kind of end up
throwing up their hands and shaking their heads, and I
don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
hoax very it is. Uh. John d in case anybody
does not recognize that name was is kind of most
famous as being the astrologer and an adviser to Queen
(13:49):
Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
to support the theory that it's actually a hoax that
he perpetrated. At the time, I remember hearing a scholar
on this particular text say, you know, it was very
common for just as it's common now for people in
business or people of wealth to purchase great art to
(14:14):
show how cultured they are. At this time, it was
similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text in
their home to show that they were cultured. And so
it could have been like a money making scheme like
a the book to go there a fake looking document
that looks like a really cool illuminated text, and we'll
just sell it to some businessman who wants people to
think he's smart. Um. I kind of love that one.
(14:37):
And another suspect implicated in that as Edward Kelly, who
was a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one
and became very close with John D. A lot of
people dismissed him as a charlatan and a fake, but
John D, for some reason, really formed um an affinity
and a close friendship with him. One of the things
that makes people think that maybe this theory is the
right one is that there are no scratch outs or
(14:57):
erasers and in the whole entirety of the book, which
even if you're copying, if you're making a copy of
something you have already written out, like I will do
that sometimes if I'm writing a letter to somebody with
a pen on paper, it will be copying out something
that I've kind of drafted on another page. Even then
at some point you make a mistake and you have
to either scratch it out or erase it. And there
(15:18):
is none of that at all, So it does not
seem like somebody was actually trying to make an accurate
set of words on the paper. Yeah, you would eventually
hit something where you would have to get rid of
it or clarify in some way. The big proponent of
the theory is Gordon rug And he's head of the
Knowledge Modeling group at Keele University and Staffordshire, England. UH
(15:40):
and he's done some interesting almost um sort of computer
science approaches to analyzing and recreating similar documents where he
lays out letters on a grid and he's created this
little um like a card that you can lay on
top of the grid and it has three cutouts and
so in that grid he's it in you know, character
(16:01):
similar to the ones in this document, and just by
moving that card around and writing out in order whatever
characters happened to land in your open spaces, you can
create this gibberish that looks really realistic and really like
a language. UM And he kind of believes this supports
again the the gibberish theory rather than it being um
a cipher that's you know, well thought out another theory.
(16:26):
So many theories about this there are, and I mean
we could go on for days and days about all
of the theories. So we're kind of hitting the high
notes on this one. Yeah, there's there's a prayer book
theory about, you know, in some kind of Germanic slash
romance creole do you have have? It was like, what
what has led to the idea of the prayer But
I think it's because it hasn't ever been decrypted. It
kind of holds popularity with people that want to think
(16:48):
it is a ciphertext and that it's a prayer book
of the Cather's that somehow managed to survive the Inquisition
when everything else was being burnt. Uh, Because everything else
was burnt, there's nothing else to possibly give us the
key to dick grip this. So that's but that's not
a very popular one. I just thought it was interesting,
(17:09):
um And at one point people were even kind of
suspicious that Voinache himself had assembled the book um to
create a faux valuable for his antiquities collection, but carbon
dating because the paper is from and the inks are
all dated further back. He would have to really be
scientifically pretty magic ulgiable that right, so that if he
(17:32):
had tried to, if that had been a forgery, it
would have been a masterful forgery using information he would
not have had really at a time. And what's really
interesting is that it's um has changed hands quite a
number of times. The first one that Will mention is
actually one of those circumstantial things so allegedly owned by
(17:56):
John D who we talked about earlier, and it was
bought from D we know, by Emperor Rudolph the second
of Germany, so the Holy Roman Emperor, for six hundred
gold duckets, which is roughly thirty thousand dollars in today's economy.
That just makes me annoyed thinking that it was potentially
the writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial evidence that
(18:19):
supports this idea, or that he bought it from D
and not from someone else, is that there are accounts
that mentioned D having come into a sum of money
that's just a little bit bigger than this. I want
to say it's like six hundred and fifteen or six
d and eighteen, and I believe it's John Dy's son
that wrote some of those at least, So it's kind
of like, well, we know that it was purchased for
(18:39):
this amount around this time, and we know that suddenly
this guy had this amount of money in his pocket
at this time. That that reminds me of one of
the police procedurals. You may have the person in the
room and they're like, Okay, we know this guy boughties
documents for for thirty thousand dollars and you magically have
a thirty thousand dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's
(19:01):
that is as as far as we can get in
terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then it
appears to Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus Horse
a key to Tepanis and I may be mispronouncing any
of that um and that exchange is based on an
inscription that's visible in the document in the onfolio one R.
(19:22):
But you have to read it with ultra violet light,
so that's ink that it's faded off, and that's all
that's sort of left is the the chemical shadow, right.
That was one of the things that they found and
documented during the chemical analysis that we were talking about
a little bit earlier. Um. One of the things that
I read in that analysis that I thought was pretty
cool was that an acid wash had been used on
the pages, possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink,
(19:45):
but that that may have been washed away other writing
in the book. Uh, so it's it's not really that
that that was written in an ink that required ultra
violet light to see at a time. It's ink that
has faded to the point that that's the only way
to see it. Yeah, destroyed through time and treatment through
the ages. Not that does not in any way support
(20:05):
the secret or alien theories. Uh, there's there are some
gaps in the timeline of where it's been, but we
do know that it was given to Athanasius Kircher in
sixteen sixty six by Johannes Marcus Marcia of cromelind. Uh.
And then there's another little kind of we're not sure
(20:26):
what happened or where the book was. We do know
that during some of these tradeoffs, people were trying to
get people to decrypt this text. So that's why we
say for more than four years people have been trying
to figure it out. And then it's suddenly, it seems
said to us, because it's the first time we hear
about it again after there were many other things happening
(20:46):
after a gap of two years. Yeah, then Voyage found
it in as I said, at Jesuit College near Rome,
and then in nineteen sixty nine it was given to
the Benicky Library by an HP Krause who had purchased
it from the estate of Voynache's widow Uh it had
passed to her and then her executor ended up selling
(21:10):
it to this person. Now we're basically up to today. Yeah.
In December, a finished businessman named Vico let Vola. I
may have mispronounced that I claimed that he was a
prophet of God and that he had been given divine
insight into the contents of this manuscript. Probably not true. Well,
(21:30):
and people question his methods and they of course want
some backup on this, and it never happens. He has
um an associate named Arikitola who is pretty much handling
pr for him UM and his statement in an interview
is that Mr la Valla said that no, no one
normal human can decode it because there is no code
(21:51):
or method to read this text. It's a channel language
of prophecy uh and that basically God had told him
what it meant, and that there is no way to
decrypt it. There is no cipher for it. You just
have to trust him that God told him this. Um
And he says it's a botany journal basically, which is
kind of funny that that's kind of a mundane thing
(22:12):
to say after God told me it's a botany journal.
I had a divine revelation of this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah,
and they're to a website that's maintained around him. But
he really this is as Tracy mentioned in December, and
then he really hasn't gotten much press passed then, Like
nobody's really paid a whole lot of attention to his
(22:33):
claims anymore. So that's where it stands. It's still a mystery.
It's still at Yale. I think to see it you
would have to jump through some hoops. Often the case
with special collections, it can be really difficult to get
actual physical access to the manuscript unless you have a
reason to be there. Yeah. But the good news is
(22:54):
there are lots of scans and photos of it online,
so if you're curious about it, you can really easily
find pictures of it. We will put those in our
share notes also, they'll find them. And it's interesting because
it's one of those things to me that even if
it is a hoax, it's now become really historically significant
in that one just the idea that it could be
a hoax perpetrated by a fairly famous historical figure kind
(23:17):
of makes it interesting in and of itself. Um, but
also just that so many people have spent so many
years trying to decipher it and reveal its meaning. That
kind of has a meaning in and of itself for me,
Like it says a lot about our desire to just
crack unknowable things and sort of our our persistence in
doing so. So, yeah, we'll see if there's someone who
(23:38):
magically cracks it. I will be upfront and say I
tend to favorite favor the gibberish theories, but we don't know.
As you said, some other piece of evidence could come
to light and all of that will change. There would
have to be sort of a Rosetta Rosetta stone for
the pointage manage yes, to really figure out if it
(23:58):
says anything whichould awfully cool, it would be both cool
and sad, which is the opposite of what I said
at the beginning of Unsolved Mystery is getting on my nerves. Yeah,
that's sort of the thing that I've noticed in doing
research on this is that even when there are pretty solid,
you know, pieces of I don't want to say evidence,
but pretty solid supporting UM concepts, uh, like the man
(24:22):
who has been able to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts,
people don't really want to accept it. There are entire
message boards and online groups surrounding this manuscript because it
is so sort of engrossing and engaging for people that
love UM ciphertext and the idea of a mystery, and
it's interesting to watch them debate. And some of them
(24:44):
will be like, yeah, I see, and his methods are
sound and that all make sense, but I don't believe
it the end, Like they just don't want to believe it. Uh.
It's fascinating because nobody wants to kind of lose the mystery.
I think at this point, after it's after gone on,
it's kind of like giving up a good friend at
that point. So now that you're all refreshed on all
(25:08):
points on the Voytage manuscript, uh, if you want to
talk about it or anything else, really that fiatu your interest.
You can do so at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com.
You can visit us at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History, on Twitter at missed in History at missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest dot
com slash missed in History. You would like to do
(25:28):
a little research about similar topics, you can go to
how stuff works dot com and type in the word
code and you will get how codebreakers work. You can
research almost anything you like at the house to works
dot com, and you can also visit us Holly and
Tracy at missed in History dot com or the Voytage
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(00:22):
Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
I'm Holly from and we are continuing and doing some
updates because I am being a slacker and taking time
to not be at work for a little while, and
(00:46):
so we're updating some of our previous episodes to keep
things going in my absence. Uh. And this is actually
an update to an episode that Holly and I recorded together,
which is the we You know, most of our stuff
is within the last twelve months, and so there's not
often a need to update things. Uh. Not so with
the Voyage Manuscript, which has had multiple needs for updates
(01:08):
since it originally came out. Yeah, this came out originally
in March, which is a little more than a year ago,
so the Voyage Manuscript. If you missed out on that episode,
it's a two forty page book full of illustrations and
a seemingly indecipherable text. Lots and lots of people wrote
to us after that episode originally came out, reminding us
(01:29):
of the x K c D comic that implies that
it was the equivalent of a fifteenth century Dungeons and
Dragons manual. I do love x K C D. I
had just forgotten that too, So Yeah, however, there have
been other new developments. Yeah, and the first two months
of two completely different teams came up with two completely
(01:53):
different theories about the manuscript, and both of them were
kind of allegedly build as breakthroughs. Yes, we're both of them.
We got many, many many emails and tweets and Facebook
notes from people saying they've cracked the Voyage Manuscript, and
we were sort of like, which one are you talking
about again? Didn't that just happened three weeks ago. The
(02:15):
first of these is on January, and that's when the
American Botanical Council published a paper in its peer reviewed journal,
which is called Herbal Graham. This was written by botanist
Dr Arthur O. Tucker as well as Rexford H. Talbot,
and the paper focused on the manuscripts botanical illustrations instead
of doing what a lot of people do, which is
(02:36):
a straight up sign trying to decipher the text. The
two compared the illustrations to ones from other manuscripts that
had existed at about the same time that the Voyage
Manuscript was first discovered, and they found an illustration that
looked very similar to a soap plant that was shown
in the Mexican codex Cruise Bodyanus so using this as
a starting point, they reportedly identified thirty seven plants, six animals,
(03:00):
and one mineral from the Voyage Manuscript that also appeared
in Central and South American texts, and from there they
worked up a theory that this manuscript is in an
extinct dialect of a Mexican indigenous language known as the Wattle.
And then on February fourteenth, so we're talking about less
than a month later, the University of Bedfordshire announced that
(03:22):
Stephen Backs, professor of Applied Linguistics, had cracked the code
on the Voyage Manuscript. In his approach and conclusions were
completely different, except that he had also started with the
plants right. He looked at medieval manuscripts in Arabic and
other languages and started trying to identify the plants and
the voyage manuscript based on the plants and these other texts,
(03:45):
And once he had pinned down some of the plant's
probable names, he started working on deciphering the text, kind
of using those plant names as the key. I were
like the Rosetta stone for his right thing. Uh. And
based on this work, Backs claim that he decoded about
ten words in fourteen signs and clusters, and he theorized
that the manuscript is a coded version of a Near
(04:07):
Eastern or Asian language. So again, too, they can't both
be right. They could be both right if the text
is not entirely in one language, like that's the only
way they would work. If it's one text written in
multiple languages, that would work. But we got so many
notes from people who were so excited and so hopeful,
(04:27):
and I hate to burst the bubble, but at the
same time, this definitely seemed like something we should take
the opportunity to update. So let's take a moment for
a word from our sponsor before we turn you back
over to us to talk to you from the past
about what we talked about with the Voyage Manuscript before. Okay,
(04:52):
here here's our original from back in marchisode on the
Voyage Manuscript. They were going to talk about one of
those great history mystery that's persisted for hundreds of years,
(05:12):
which I always love those, because you know, once it's
it just remains a mystery for x amount of time.
It's just probably always going to be a mystery. And
even if it gets solved, I think there will always
be detractors, which makes it kind of well and I
it's one of those things that I always am a
little bit annoyed at the unsolved mystery because I wanted
to know the real story. I don't know that we
ever can because there will never probably be an accepted
(05:35):
version of the real story by every universally accepted. Yes,
there would have to be some kind of new discovery
on this one, I think so, yes. But well, we're
talking about today is a document called the Voytage Manuscript.
You may or may not have heard of it. Some
uh sort of code breaking fans have have done a
lot of study on it. Some historians are really into it.
(05:56):
But what it is is a book that no one
can read, Yes, is in an unknown language? Yes. Most
people consider it to be a cipher text of some
sort perhaps, um. It could be that it could also
be nonsense. Uh. There are the outliers that like to
(06:16):
say Aliens brought it, but there's some scientific evidence that
that is not really the case. Um. So for some
basic background on it. It's actually named after a fairly
modern person, Wilfred Voynage, who was an anti Korean bookseller
that acquired the text in UM. He was Polish American
and he found it in a Jesuit library near Rome
(06:38):
and purchased it there. Two forty pages long and written
in an unknown text. It's kind of pretty and loopy
to look at. It is a very curly, it's flowing script.
It's very pretty um and colorful. Yes, it's currently how
is that um yale And we'll talk about that a
little bit later. But they have this great descriptor in
(07:00):
here UM page about it, where it says it is
drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue,
and red. And it just sounds so sweet and quaint
the way they describe it as this, And when you
look at it, it's both quaint and weird because it's
illustrated throughout. There are a hundred and thirteen unidentified plant
species drawn in there, astronomical and astrological drawings. There are
(07:23):
basically drawings of some sort of like the botanical slash
scientific variety on almost every page of the thing, um,
some of which is not immediately recognizable as no there.
That's one of the ways that people have tried to
approach it, is by identifying some of the plant life
that's drawn in it and trying to backwards engineer that way,
(07:43):
but that hasn't really panned out. Um. There are also
some interesting female nudes in it. Yes, Uh, it's interesting.
I looked at some of these pictures and I couldn't tell.
They all have swollen abdomens. But I can't tell if
it's trying to depict pregnancy or just the more the
round body type that has been popular throughout history at
(08:04):
certain points. It's a little bit hard to know for sure. Well,
I love the Yale description of it. Miniature female nudes,
most with swelled abdomens, immersed or waiting in fluids and
oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules. Yeah, I think
that's part of what has caused people to want to
(08:24):
attribute it to alien origin. It is a little bit
it's odd, it's a little bit freaky. It's odd, and
just from that description brings up sort of connotations of
weird fertility, something strangeness. Yeah, people being strung together. It's
it's a little bit weird. There are also nine cosmological
medallions and they're many of those are huge, and they're
(08:47):
drawn across um folded folio pages and in some cases
they may be depicting geographical elements, but it's not again
always clear. We haven't correcked this. And then medicinal herbs
and roots, which are considered separate from the plant species.
(09:07):
And there's no byline. No, we don't know who wrote it,
which is part of the mystery. So it is currently
housed at Yale University in the UH I believe it's
pronounced by Nicki Rare Book and Manuscript Library and it's
listed as MS four oh eighty. There's a pretty cool
page at Yale that that gives more information about it,
and we will link to it from the shore notes
(09:28):
we have started doing with this podcast. Would like to
have a look at a more detail about what it
looks like and what's in there. Yeah, they did a
wonderful job of breaking down and describing really every element
of the book UM from a you know, an unbiased,
pretty neutral standpoint, just kind of I once worked in
(09:48):
a library as doing acquisitions and cataloging assistance. So they're
perfect basically is what I'm saying. They're cataloging UM is
like an ideal for and that you would catalog something
that you don't understand, right it is. It is a
very fascinating read. There is also linked from there a
chemical analysis of the book itself and what the pages
(10:10):
are made of and what the anks are made of. Yeah,
which is what kind of uh squelches any of those
alien origin theories where they're identified elements from our planet. Yes,
and we have also scientifically, we being other researchers, identified
the approximately when it was created. There was a two
thousand nine University of Arizona project. Researchers carbendated it to
(10:34):
the early half of the fifteenth century, so there's a
probability that it was written between fourteen of four and
fourteen thirty eight. I mean, that's the basic description of it.
So then we're kind of onto what is this thing.
I don't know, and everybody has theories, and because it's
never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might be the
right one. Um. Some people think it could be a
(10:57):
book of secrets, like it's alchemy or another secret knowledge,
and that it is in fact a medieval cipher text
that is intended to hide and prevent others from getting
this secret knowledge. Uh. Some have even suggested that it's
actually a record of inventions and discoveries of Roger Bacon,
who was a friar and scholar in the u but
(11:20):
that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah, that was a
very circumstantial thing of there are things in here that
he was interested in, so maybe he made this and
that's Yeah, there's definitely a lot of circumstantial evidence around
all of it. Every theory about it, the remnant of
an ancient language theory doesn't really hold a lot of water.
It's one of those things that when you hear linguist
(11:42):
experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when
you first look at it, it looks like something we
should be able to read. It looks like a text,
it looks like you know, an alphabet. But the deeper
they get into it, the more they realize they can't.
It becomes sort of more a usaid of the more
they study it. And that's one of those ideas that's
(12:03):
pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There are definitely
written languages that we have not been able to decipher
until we have found some other texts that has led
us decipher it. So I think that's one of those
ideas that hasn an allure to it, but that has
not really panned out. Yeah, And one of the one
of the things that kind of discounts that theory is
(12:25):
that normally in any language, the most common words are
normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just like in
English it would be you know, your articles, articles, prepositions, etcetera.
They tend to be compact, short little words, and in
this particular document, the most common words tend to be
very long and sort of complicated in comparison to the rest,
(12:45):
which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
one of the things that um people who are fond
of the Gibberish theory like to cite like this doesn't
make sense as a language. It's probably not, and people
have been trying to decrypt it since at least the
sixteen hundreds. We know, uh, even in World War Two
(13:07):
army codebreakers were just sort of taking a crack at
it on the side, and they couldn't make heads nor
tails of it. They couldn't really like even get you know,
sort of a toe hold in to be like, oh,
we think we might know, we have no idea. Again,
that almost seems suspicious to me that nobody, in four
hundred plus years of trying to analyze this document could
(13:29):
really get any sort of positive affirmation that they were
on the right track. They all kind of end up
throwing up their hands and shaking their heads, and I
don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
hoax very it is. Uh. John d in case anybody
does not recognize that name was is kind of most
famous as being the astrologer and an adviser to Queen
(13:49):
Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
to support the theory that it's actually a hoax that
he perpetrated. At the time, I remember hearing a scholar
on this particular text say, you know, it was very
common for just as it's common now for people in
business or people of wealth to purchase great art to
(14:14):
show how cultured they are. At this time, it was
similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text in
their home to show that they were cultured. And so
it could have been like a money making scheme like
a the book to go there a fake looking document
that looks like a really cool illuminated text, and we'll
just sell it to some businessman who wants people to
think he's smart. Um. I kind of love that one.
(14:37):
And another suspect implicated in that as Edward Kelly, who
was a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one
and became very close with John D. A lot of
people dismissed him as a charlatan and a fake, but
John D, for some reason, really formed um an affinity
and a close friendship with him. One of the things
that makes people think that maybe this theory is the
right one is that there are no scratch outs or
(14:57):
erasers and in the whole entirety of the book, which
even if you're copying, if you're making a copy of
something you have already written out, like I will do
that sometimes if I'm writing a letter to somebody with
a pen on paper, it will be copying out something
that I've kind of drafted on another page. Even then
at some point you make a mistake and you have
to either scratch it out or erase it. And there
(15:18):
is none of that at all, So it does not
seem like somebody was actually trying to make an accurate
set of words on the paper. Yeah, you would eventually
hit something where you would have to get rid of
it or clarify in some way. The big proponent of
the theory is Gordon rug And he's head of the
Knowledge Modeling group at Keele University and Staffordshire, England. UH
(15:40):
and he's done some interesting almost um sort of computer
science approaches to analyzing and recreating similar documents where he
lays out letters on a grid and he's created this
little um like a card that you can lay on
top of the grid and it has three cutouts and
so in that grid he's it in you know, character
(16:01):
similar to the ones in this document, and just by
moving that card around and writing out in order whatever
characters happened to land in your open spaces, you can
create this gibberish that looks really realistic and really like
a language. UM And he kind of believes this supports
again the the gibberish theory rather than it being um
a cipher that's you know, well thought out another theory.
(16:26):
So many theories about this there are, and I mean
we could go on for days and days about all
of the theories. So we're kind of hitting the high
notes on this one. Yeah, there's there's a prayer book
theory about, you know, in some kind of Germanic slash
romance creole do you have have? It was like, what
what has led to the idea of the prayer But
I think it's because it hasn't ever been decrypted. It
kind of holds popularity with people that want to think
(16:48):
it is a ciphertext and that it's a prayer book
of the Cather's that somehow managed to survive the Inquisition
when everything else was being burnt. Uh, Because everything else
was burnt, there's nothing else to possibly give us the
key to dick grip this. So that's but that's not
a very popular one. I just thought it was interesting,
(17:09):
um And at one point people were even kind of
suspicious that Voinache himself had assembled the book um to
create a faux valuable for his antiquities collection, but carbon
dating because the paper is from and the inks are
all dated further back. He would have to really be
scientifically pretty magic ulgiable that right, so that if he
(17:32):
had tried to, if that had been a forgery, it
would have been a masterful forgery using information he would
not have had really at a time. And what's really
interesting is that it's um has changed hands quite a
number of times. The first one that Will mention is
actually one of those circumstantial things so allegedly owned by
(17:56):
John D who we talked about earlier, and it was
bought from D we know, by Emperor Rudolph the second
of Germany, so the Holy Roman Emperor, for six hundred
gold duckets, which is roughly thirty thousand dollars in today's economy.
That just makes me annoyed thinking that it was potentially
the writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial evidence that
(18:19):
supports this idea, or that he bought it from D
and not from someone else, is that there are accounts
that mentioned D having come into a sum of money
that's just a little bit bigger than this. I want
to say it's like six hundred and fifteen or six
d and eighteen, and I believe it's John Dy's son
that wrote some of those at least, So it's kind
of like, well, we know that it was purchased for
(18:39):
this amount around this time, and we know that suddenly
this guy had this amount of money in his pocket
at this time. That that reminds me of one of
the police procedurals. You may have the person in the
room and they're like, Okay, we know this guy boughties
documents for for thirty thousand dollars and you magically have
a thirty thousand dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's
(19:01):
that is as as far as we can get in
terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then it
appears to Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus Horse
a key to Tepanis and I may be mispronouncing any
of that um and that exchange is based on an
inscription that's visible in the document in the onfolio one R.
(19:22):
But you have to read it with ultra violet light,
so that's ink that it's faded off, and that's all
that's sort of left is the the chemical shadow, right.
That was one of the things that they found and
documented during the chemical analysis that we were talking about
a little bit earlier. Um. One of the things that
I read in that analysis that I thought was pretty
cool was that an acid wash had been used on
the pages, possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink,
(19:45):
but that that may have been washed away other writing
in the book. Uh, so it's it's not really that
that that was written in an ink that required ultra
violet light to see at a time. It's ink that
has faded to the point that that's the only way
to see it. Yeah, destroyed through time and treatment through
the ages. Not that does not in any way support
(20:05):
the secret or alien theories. Uh, there's there are some
gaps in the timeline of where it's been, but we
do know that it was given to Athanasius Kircher in
sixteen sixty six by Johannes Marcus Marcia of cromelind. Uh.
And then there's another little kind of we're not sure
(20:26):
what happened or where the book was. We do know
that during some of these tradeoffs, people were trying to
get people to decrypt this text. So that's why we
say for more than four years people have been trying
to figure it out. And then it's suddenly, it seems
said to us, because it's the first time we hear
about it again after there were many other things happening
(20:46):
after a gap of two years. Yeah, then Voyage found
it in as I said, at Jesuit College near Rome,
and then in nineteen sixty nine it was given to
the Benicky Library by an HP Krause who had purchased
it from the estate of Voynache's widow Uh it had
passed to her and then her executor ended up selling
(21:10):
it to this person. Now we're basically up to today. Yeah.
In December, a finished businessman named Vico let Vola. I
may have mispronounced that I claimed that he was a
prophet of God and that he had been given divine
insight into the contents of this manuscript. Probably not true. Well,
(21:30):
and people question his methods and they of course want
some backup on this, and it never happens. He has
um an associate named Arikitola who is pretty much handling
pr for him UM and his statement in an interview
is that Mr la Valla said that no, no one
normal human can decode it because there is no code
(21:51):
or method to read this text. It's a channel language
of prophecy uh and that basically God had told him
what it meant, and that there is no way to
decrypt it. There is no cipher for it. You just
have to trust him that God told him this. Um
And he says it's a botany journal basically, which is
kind of funny that that's kind of a mundane thing
(22:12):
to say after God told me it's a botany journal.
I had a divine revelation of this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah,
and they're to a website that's maintained around him. But
he really this is as Tracy mentioned in December, and
then he really hasn't gotten much press passed then, Like
nobody's really paid a whole lot of attention to his
(22:33):
claims anymore. So that's where it stands. It's still a mystery.
It's still at Yale. I think to see it you
would have to jump through some hoops. Often the case
with special collections, it can be really difficult to get
actual physical access to the manuscript unless you have a
reason to be there. Yeah. But the good news is
(22:54):
there are lots of scans and photos of it online,
so if you're curious about it, you can really easily
find pictures of it. We will put those in our
share notes also, they'll find them. And it's interesting because
it's one of those things to me that even if
it is a hoax, it's now become really historically significant
in that one just the idea that it could be
a hoax perpetrated by a fairly famous historical figure kind
(23:17):
of makes it interesting in and of itself. Um, but
also just that so many people have spent so many
years trying to decipher it and reveal its meaning. That
kind of has a meaning in and of itself for me,
Like it says a lot about our desire to just
crack unknowable things and sort of our our persistence in
doing so. So, yeah, we'll see if there's someone who
(23:38):
magically cracks it. I will be upfront and say I
tend to favorite favor the gibberish theories, but we don't know.
As you said, some other piece of evidence could come
to light and all of that will change. There would
have to be sort of a Rosetta Rosetta stone for
the pointage manage yes, to really figure out if it
(23:58):
says anything whichould awfully cool, it would be both cool
and sad, which is the opposite of what I said
at the beginning of Unsolved Mystery is getting on my nerves. Yeah,
that's sort of the thing that I've noticed in doing
research on this is that even when there are pretty solid,
you know, pieces of I don't want to say evidence,
but pretty solid supporting UM concepts, uh, like the man
(24:22):
who has been able to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts,
people don't really want to accept it. There are entire
message boards and online groups surrounding this manuscript because it
is so sort of engrossing and engaging for people that
love UM ciphertext and the idea of a mystery, and
it's interesting to watch them debate. And some of them
(24:44):
will be like, yeah, I see, and his methods are
sound and that all make sense, but I don't believe
it the end, Like they just don't want to believe it. Uh.
It's fascinating because nobody wants to kind of lose the mystery.
I think at this point, after it's after gone on,
it's kind of like giving up a good friend at
that point. So now that you're all refreshed on all
(25:08):
points on the Voytage manuscript, uh, if you want to
talk about it or anything else, really that fiatu your interest.
You can do so at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com.
You can visit us at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History, on Twitter at missed in History at missed
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com slash missed in History. You would like to do
(25:28):
a little research about similar topics, you can go to
how stuff works dot com and type in the word
code and you will get how codebreakers work. You can
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dot com, and you can also visit us Holly and
Tracy at missed in History dot com or the Voytage
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