September 16, 2017 • 27 mins
New theories have emerged that make it the right time to once again go back to an old favorite, the Voynich Manuscript. Since our Voynich Manuscript episode first published, the inscrutable book has been in the news a lot. What are the latest theories?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Our classic episode today is one that has
been all over the news recently. On September, The Times
Literary Supplement published an article called Voyage Manuscript The Solution
by Nicholas Gibbs, which purportedly decoded the Voyage Manuscript. Okay,
(00:22):
we were immediately skeptical for a few reasons. One is
at the Times Literary Supplement builds itself as quote the
leading international weekly for literary culture, but it's not an
academic journal or otherwise subject to peer review, so that
kind of, you know, it maybe lovely, but that doesn't
always make it a scientifically representative publication. Great of salt time,
(00:46):
sort of like when a discovery is announced as a
press release for a TV show, just as an example, right.
And another is that for a purported solution, it didn't
really offer that much detail. The Atlantic has a good
roundup of various other criticisms, and we're going to link
to that in the show notes. Aside from all that,
we were skeptical because we've been through all this before.
(01:08):
Our classic episode today is actually update to our installment
on the Voytage Manuscript, so at the start you will
get to hear us kind of gleefully talk about two
completely contradictory solutions in air quotes that had come out
within just a few weeks of each other at that time.
So let's go Welcome to Stuff you missed in history
(01:32):
class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we are
continuing and doing some updates because I am being a
slacker and taking time to to not be at work
(01:54):
for a little while, and 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 that 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
(02:16):
needs for updates since it originally came out. Yeah, this
came out originally in March of 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 of the x K
(02:39):
C D comic that implies that it was the equivalent
of a fifth fifteenth century Dungeons and Dragons manual. I
do love x K C D. I had just forgotten
about it too, So Yeah, however, there have been other
new developments. Yeah, and the first two months to completely
(03:00):
different teams came up with two completely 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? Yeah, didn't that
(03:22):
just happen three weeks ago. The first of these is
on January, and that's when the American Botanical Council published
a paper and its peer reviewed journal, which is called
Herbal Graham. This was written by botanist Dr Arthur O.
Tucker as well as Rexford H. Talbert, and the paper
focused on the manuscripts botanical illustrations instead of doing what
(03:44):
a lot of people do, which is just straight up
tin 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 ant that was shown in the Mexican codex
Cruise Bodianas, so, using this as a starting point, they
(04:06):
reportedly identified thirty seven plants, six animals, 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 Natal. And then on
February fourteenth, so we're talking about less than a month later,
(04:30):
the University of Bedfordshire announced that Stephen Back's 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
(04:52):
on the plants in these other texts, 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,
Bax claims that he decoded about ten words and fourteen
(05:12):
signs and clusters, and he theorized that the manuscript is
a coded version of a Near 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 were. If
it's one text written in multiple languages, that would work.
(05:32):
But we got so many notes from people who were
so excited and so hopeful, 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
(05:54):
with the Voindage manuscript before. Okay, here here's our original
from back in marchisode on the Voyage Manuscript. They were
(06:15):
going to talk about one of those great history mysteries
that's persisted for hundreds of years, 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
(06:35):
that I always am a little bit annoyed at the
unselved mystery because I want to know the real story.
I don't know that we ever can, because there will
never probably be an accepted 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 we're talking about today is a document called the
Voyage Manuscript. You may or may not have heard of it.
(06:59):
Some sort of code breaking fans have have done a
lot of study on it. Some historians are really into it.
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,
(07:20):
it could be that it could also be nonsense. Uh.
There are the outliers that like to 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
(07:41):
in um. He was Polish American and he found it
in a Jesuit library near Rome and purchased it there.
Two forty pages long and written 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 housed at um Yale, and
(08:05):
we'll talk about that a little bit later. But they
have this great descriptor in their page about it, where
it says is drawn in ink with vibrant washes in
various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. 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,
(08:30):
astronomical and astrological drawings. There are 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
(08:51):
and trying to backwards engineer that way, 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 sort of round
body type that has been popular throughout history at certain points.
(09:14):
It's a little bit hard to know for sure. Well,
I love the Yale description of it. Miniature female nudes,
most with swelled abdomen's 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
attribute it to alien origin. It is a little bit
(09:38):
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 drawn across
um folded folio pages and in some cases they may
(10:02):
be depicting geographical elements, but it's not, again always clear.
We haven't cracked this. And then medicinal herbs and roots,
which are considered separate from the plant species, 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
(10:25):
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 show notes we
have started doing with this podcast. We'd like to have
a look at more detail about what it looks like
and what's in there. Yeah, they did a wonderful job
(10:46):
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 a library as
doing equi usians and cataloging assistants. So they're perfect basically
is what I'm saying. They're cataloging. UM is like an
(11:08):
ideal version 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 are made of and
what the inks are made of. Yeah, which is what
kind of uh squelches any of those alien origin theories
because they're identified elements from our planet. Yes, and we
(11:30):
have also scientifically, we being other researchers us identified the
approximately when it was created. There was a two thousand
nine University of Arizona project. Researchers carbendated it to the
early half of the fifteenth century, so there's a probability
that it was written between fourteen of four and fourteen
(11:51):
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 theory reason because it's
never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might be the
right one. Um. Some people think it could be a
book of secrets like it's alchemy or some other secret knowledge,
and that it is in fact a medieval ciphertext that
(12:13):
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 d Um but
that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah, that was a
very circumstantial thing of there are things in here that
(12:34):
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
experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when
(12:56):
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 elusive the more they study it,
which is kind of fascinat And that's one of those ideas.
That's pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There are
definitely written languages that we have not been able to
(13:19):
decipher until we have found some other text that has
led us decipher it. So I think that's one of
those ideas that has 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 that normally, in any language, the most common words
are normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just like
(13:40):
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,
which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
one of the things that at UM people who are
(14:02):
fond of the Gibberish theory like to site 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 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
(14:26):
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
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 like, I
(14:46):
don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
hoax theory 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
Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
to support the theory that it's actually a hoax that
(15:07):
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
show how cultured they are, at this time, it was
similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text in
(15:31):
their home to show that they were cultured, and so
it could have been like a money making scheme, like
a let's 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.
And another suspect implicated in that is Edward Kelly, who
was a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one
(15:52):
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 aloe 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 erasers,
and in the whole entirety of the book, which even
if you're copying, if you're making a copy of something
(16:14):
you have already written out, like I will do that
sometimes if I am 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
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
(16:37):
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
and he's done some interesting almost um sort of computer
science approaches to analyzing and recreating similar documents where he
(16:58):
lays out letter is 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 put in, you know,
character 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
(17:20):
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.
So many theories about us. There are and I mean
(17:41):
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 you have? It was like,
what what has led to the idea of the prayer book?
You know? I think it's because it hasn't ever been decrypted.
It kind of whole olds popularity with people that want
(18:02):
to think 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 decrypt this. So that's but that's
not a very popular one. I just thought it was interesting,
(18:22):
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 magical to all that. So that if he had
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
one of those circumstantial things so allegedly owned by 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 dickets,
which is roughly thirty thousand dollars in today's economy. That
just makes me annoyed thinking that it was potentially the
(19:29):
writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial evidence that 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 eighteen,
and I believe it's John D's son that wrote some
of those at least, so it's kind of like, well,
(19:52):
we know that it was purchased for 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,
and they have the person in the room and they're like, Okay,
we know this guy bodies documents for for thirty thou
dollars and you magically have a thirty thou dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(20:13):
It's that is as as far as we can get
in terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then
it appears Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus Horse
a key the 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 on folio
(20:35):
one R. But you have to read it with ultraviolet light,
so that's ink that it's faded off, and that's all
that's sort of left is 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. 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
(20:56):
possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink, but
that that may have been washed away other writing in
the book. Uh, so it's it's not really 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,
it's been destroyed through time and treatment through the ages.
(21:17):
Not that does not in any way support 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
(21:37):
there's another little kind of we're not sure 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.
But after there were many other things happening. After a
(22:00):
gap of two years, yeah. Then Voynage 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 Voynage's widow. Uh. It had passed to
her and then her executor ended up selling it to
(22:24):
this person. Now we're basically up to today. Yeah. In
December eleven, a finished businessman named vico let Valla I
may have mispronounced that 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,
(22:44):
and people question his methods and they of course want
some backup on this, and it never happens. He has
um an associate named Ari Kitola who is pretty much
handling pr for him UM and his statement in an
interview was that Mr la Vala said that no, no
one normal human can decode it because there is no
(23:05):
code 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
(23:26):
thing to say after God told me it's a botany journal,
I had a divine revelation of this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah,
and there's a website that's maintained around him, but he
really this was, 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 claims anymore.
(23:48):
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 part of special collection,
often the case with special collections, and 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 there are lots of scans and
(24:09):
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, go 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 of makes it interesting in and
(24:31):
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 magically cracks it. I will
(24:54):
be upfront and say I tend to favor favor the
jibberish theories, but we don't know something. As you said,
some other piece of evidence could come to light and
all of that will change. That would have to be
sort of a Rosetta Rosetta stone for the point, yes,
to to really figure out if it says anything, which
would be awfully cool. It would be both cool and sad,
(25:16):
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
who has been able to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts,
(25:41):
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
will be like, yeah, I see, and his methods are sound,
and that all makes sense, but I don't believe it
(26:02):
the end, Like they just don't want to believe it. Uh,
It's just it's fascinating stuff because nobody wants to kind
of lose the mystery. I think at this point, after
it's after gone on for some years, it's kind of
like giving up a good friend at that point. Hey,
since these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we
(26:24):
have some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff
you've heard before. If you want to email us, our
email address is History Podcast at house to works dot com,
and you can find us across the spectrum of social
media as Missed in History. You can also find us
at Missed in History dot com, and you can visit
our parent company house to works at how stuff Works
(26:44):
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com.
Happy Saturday. Our classic episode today is one that has
been all over the news recently. On September, The Times
Literary Supplement published an article called Voyage Manuscript The Solution
by Nicholas Gibbs, which purportedly decoded the Voyage Manuscript. Okay,
(00:22):
we were immediately skeptical for a few reasons. One is
at the Times Literary Supplement builds itself as quote the
leading international weekly for literary culture, but it's not an
academic journal or otherwise subject to peer review, so that
kind of, you know, it maybe lovely, but that doesn't
always make it a scientifically representative publication. Great of salt time,
(00:46):
sort of like when a discovery is announced as a
press release for a TV show, just as an example, right.
And another is that for a purported solution, it didn't
really offer that much detail. The Atlantic has a good
roundup of various other criticisms, and we're going to link
to that in the show notes. Aside from all that,
we were skeptical because we've been through all this before.
(01:08):
Our classic episode today is actually update to our installment
on the Voytage Manuscript, so at the start you will
get to hear us kind of gleefully talk about two
completely contradictory solutions in air quotes that had come out
within just a few weeks of each other at that time.
So let's go Welcome to Stuff you missed in history
(01:32):
class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we are
continuing and doing some updates because I am being a
slacker and taking time to to not be at work
(01:54):
for a little while, and 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 that 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
(02:16):
needs for updates since it originally came out. Yeah, this
came out originally in March of 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 of the x K
(02:39):
C D comic that implies that it was the equivalent
of a fifth fifteenth century Dungeons and Dragons manual. I
do love x K C D. I had just forgotten
about it too, So Yeah, however, there have been other
new developments. Yeah, and the first two months to completely
(03:00):
different teams came up with two completely 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? Yeah, didn't that
(03:22):
just happen three weeks ago. The first of these is
on January, and that's when the American Botanical Council published
a paper and its peer reviewed journal, which is called
Herbal Graham. This was written by botanist Dr Arthur O.
Tucker as well as Rexford H. Talbert, and the paper
focused on the manuscripts botanical illustrations instead of doing what
(03:44):
a lot of people do, which is just straight up
tin 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 ant that was shown in the Mexican codex
Cruise Bodianas, so, using this as a starting point, they
(04:06):
reportedly identified thirty seven plants, six animals, 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 Natal. And then on
February fourteenth, so we're talking about less than a month later,
(04:30):
the University of Bedfordshire announced that Stephen Back's 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
(04:52):
on the plants in these other texts, 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,
Bax claims that he decoded about ten words and fourteen
(05:12):
signs and clusters, and he theorized that the manuscript is
a coded version of a Near 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 were. If
it's one text written in multiple languages, that would work.
(05:32):
But we got so many notes from people who were
so excited and so hopeful, 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
(05:54):
with the Voindage manuscript before. Okay, here here's our original
from back in marchisode on the Voyage Manuscript. They were
(06:15):
going to talk about one of those great history mysteries
that's persisted for hundreds of years, 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
(06:35):
that I always am a little bit annoyed at the
unselved mystery because I want to know the real story.
I don't know that we ever can, because there will
never probably be an accepted 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 we're talking about today is a document called the
Voyage Manuscript. You may or may not have heard of it.
(06:59):
Some sort of code breaking fans have have done a
lot of study on it. Some historians are really into it.
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,
(07:20):
it could be that it could also be nonsense. Uh.
There are the outliers that like to 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
(07:41):
in um. He was Polish American and he found it
in a Jesuit library near Rome and purchased it there.
Two forty pages long and written 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 housed at um Yale, and
(08:05):
we'll talk about that a little bit later. But they
have this great descriptor in their page about it, where
it says is drawn in ink with vibrant washes in
various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. 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,
(08:30):
astronomical and astrological drawings. There are 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
(08:51):
and trying to backwards engineer that way, 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 sort of round
body type that has been popular throughout history at certain points.
(09:14):
It's a little bit hard to know for sure. Well,
I love the Yale description of it. Miniature female nudes,
most with swelled abdomen's 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
attribute it to alien origin. It is a little bit
(09:38):
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 drawn across
um folded folio pages and in some cases they may
(10:02):
be depicting geographical elements, but it's not, again always clear.
We haven't cracked this. And then medicinal herbs and roots,
which are considered separate from the plant species, 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
(10:25):
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 show notes we
have started doing with this podcast. We'd like to have
a look at more detail about what it looks like
and what's in there. Yeah, they did a wonderful job
(10:46):
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 a library as
doing equi usians and cataloging assistants. So they're perfect basically
is what I'm saying. They're cataloging. UM is like an
(11:08):
ideal version 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 are made of and
what the inks are made of. Yeah, which is what
kind of uh squelches any of those alien origin theories
because they're identified elements from our planet. Yes, and we
(11:30):
have also scientifically, we being other researchers us identified the
approximately when it was created. There was a two thousand
nine University of Arizona project. Researchers carbendated it to the
early half of the fifteenth century, so there's a probability
that it was written between fourteen of four and fourteen
(11:51):
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 theory reason because it's
never proven out, everyone thinks their theory might be the
right one. Um. Some people think it could be a
book of secrets like it's alchemy or some other secret knowledge,
and that it is in fact a medieval ciphertext that
(12:13):
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 d Um but
that theory has mostly been discounted. Yeah, that was a
very circumstantial thing of there are things in here that
(12:34):
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
experts and cryptographers talk about, they immediately will say, when
(12:56):
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 elusive the more they study it,
which is kind of fascinat And that's one of those ideas.
That's pretty captivating because languages do go extinct. There are
definitely written languages that we have not been able to
(13:19):
decipher until we have found some other text that has
led us decipher it. So I think that's one of
those ideas that has 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 that normally, in any language, the most common words
are normally quite short, like the repeated words. Just like
(13:40):
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,
which kind of breaks the rules of language, which is
one of the things that at UM people who are
(14:02):
fond of the Gibberish theory like to site 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 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
(14:26):
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
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 like, I
(14:46):
don't know. Here's one of my favorites is that the
hoax theory 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
Elizabeth the First, and some people attribute it or want
to support the theory that it's actually a hoax that
(15:07):
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
show how cultured they are, at this time, it was
similarly popular for people to have an illuminated text in
(15:31):
their home to show that they were cultured, and so
it could have been like a money making scheme, like
a let's 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.
And another suspect implicated in that is Edward Kelly, who
was a hanger on in the court of Elizabeth one
(15:52):
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 aloe 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 erasers,
and in the whole entirety of the book, which even
if you're copying, if you're making a copy of something
(16:14):
you have already written out, like I will do that
sometimes if I am 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
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
(16:37):
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
and he's done some interesting almost um sort of computer
science approaches to analyzing and recreating similar documents where he
(16:58):
lays out letter is 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 put in, you know,
character 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
(17:20):
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.
So many theories about us. There are and I mean
(17:41):
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 you have? It was like,
what what has led to the idea of the prayer book?
You know? I think it's because it hasn't ever been decrypted.
It kind of whole olds popularity with people that want
(18:02):
to think 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 decrypt this. So that's but that's
not a very popular one. I just thought it was interesting,
(18:22):
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 magical to all that. So that if he had
(18:45):
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
(19:06):
one of those circumstantial things so allegedly owned by 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 dickets,
which is roughly thirty thousand dollars in today's economy. That
just makes me annoyed thinking that it was potentially the
(19:29):
writings of Roger Bacon. And the circumstantial evidence that 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 eighteen,
and I believe it's John D's son that wrote some
of those at least, so it's kind of like, well,
(19:52):
we know that it was purchased for 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,
and they have the person in the room and they're like, Okay,
we know this guy bodies documents for for thirty thou
dollars and you magically have a thirty thou dollar bank deposit. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(20:13):
It's that is as as far as we can get
in terms of veracity with this one. Uh. And then
it appears Emperor Rudolph gave the manuscript to Jacobus Horse
a key the 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 on folio
(20:35):
one R. But you have to read it with ultraviolet light,
so that's ink that it's faded off, and that's all
that's sort of left is 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. 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
(20:56):
possibly to bring out the vibrancy of the ink, but
that that may have been washed away other writing in
the book. Uh, so it's it's not really 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,
it's been destroyed through time and treatment through the ages.
(21:17):
Not that does not in any way support 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
(21:37):
there's another little kind of we're not sure 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.
But after there were many other things happening. After a
(22:00):
gap of two years, yeah. Then Voynage 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 Voynage's widow. Uh. It had passed to
her and then her executor ended up selling it to
(22:24):
this person. Now we're basically up to today. Yeah. In
December eleven, a finished businessman named vico let Valla I
may have mispronounced that 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,
(22:44):
and people question his methods and they of course want
some backup on this, and it never happens. He has
um an associate named Ari Kitola who is pretty much
handling pr for him UM and his statement in an
interview was that Mr la Vala said that no, no
one normal human can decode it because there is no
(23:05):
code 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
(23:26):
thing to say after God told me it's a botany journal,
I had a divine revelation of this extremely ordinary thing. Yeah,
and there's a website that's maintained around him, but he
really this was, 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 claims anymore.
(23:48):
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 part of special collection,
often the case with special collections, and 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 there are lots of scans and
(24:09):
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, go 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 of makes it interesting in and
(24:31):
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 magically cracks it. I will
(24:54):
be upfront and say I tend to favor favor the
jibberish theories, but we don't know something. As you said,
some other piece of evidence could come to light and
all of that will change. That would have to be
sort of a Rosetta Rosetta stone for the point, yes,
to to really figure out if it says anything, which
would be awfully cool. It would be both cool and sad,
(25:16):
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
who has been able to replicate pretty similar gibberish texts,
(25:41):
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
will be like, yeah, I see, and his methods are sound,
and that all makes sense, but I don't believe it
(26:02):
the end, Like they just don't want to believe it. Uh,
It's just it's fascinating stuff because nobody wants to kind
of lose the mystery. I think at this point, after
it's after gone on for some years, it's kind of
like giving up a good friend at that point. Hey,
since these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we
(26:24):
have some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff
you've heard before. If you want to email us, our
email address is History Podcast at house to works dot com,
and you can find us across the spectrum of social
media as Missed in History. You can also find us
at Missed in History dot com, and you can visit
our parent company house to works at how stuff Works
(26:44):
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com.
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