Experts are on an intense chase to uncover the 600-year-old mystery behind Voynich Code

No matter how advanced our technologies are, we have yet to solve some of the mysteries of the past. Among some notable historical codes and manuscripts, one particular manuscript considered the most mysterious by academic scholars and code-breakers is the Voynich codex. Housed in the renowned Beinecke Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Yale University, Connecticut, this manuscript is known to be from the 15th century and written by an unknown author. Ever since it was first acquired in 1912 by a Polish-American antique book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, its incomprehensible nature has not changed, but experts are keen on deciphering it.

History often speaks about this mysterious Voynich code, which graced the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Germany and was part of a secret book sale in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome. Experts believe the Roman emperor purchased it, believing it to be a work of philosopher Roger Bacon. After traveling through several scholars in history, it reached the hands of Voynich, whose widow sold it to H.P. Kraus who in turn gave the codex to the Yale University's literary archive. Since Voynich's acquisition in the 20th century, this manuscript gained traction among decoding experts. The deciphered language and incredible illustrations make it a bewildering artifact.

Philosopher Willian Newbold in 1921 believed that the codex was the work of a 13th-century friar who wrote it as a scientific treatise indicating the possibility of the invention of the microscope. However, John Manly, an American literature professor, disproved Newbold's unreliable theory, as per The New Yorker. Furthermore, when the renowned cryptographers tactfully analyzed the codex, they couldn't decipher it but came up with a possible explanation that it was an "early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type." With the advancement in computational analysis tools, the Voynich manuscript's mystery was further examined and physicist Andreas Schinner deduced that the text was "not a natural language" and was "meaningless."

The most recent evidence of deciphering the Voynich code negated Schinner's theory that it was a random script. Computer scientist Greg Kondrak and his student, Bradley Hauer, harnessed a machine-learning algorithm trained on hundreds of possible translations of the text. As per the press release by the University of Alberta, Kondrak and Hauer inferred that the manuscript was nothing but jumbled-up Hebrew. As per Lisa Fagin Davis, the executive director of the Medieval Society of America and visiting professor of paleography at Yale, "Everyone wants to be the one to prove it, to crack it, to prove your abilities, to prove you're smarter. Hardly anyone out there understands all the different components."

The components of the manuscript seemed to imply diverse scientific subjects. One can see drawings of 113 unidentified plant species, astronomical and astrological drawings, Zodiac symbols and nude females emerging from pipes or chimneys or submerged in fluids and strangely interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules. Also, the manuscript contained an array of nine cosmological medallions, pharmaceutical drawings of more than 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots and a plethora of text that were conceivably recipes. The drawings were highlighted with vibrant ink of varied shades like green, red, blue, brown and yellow. Also, star-like flowers marked each entry in the margins of the several pages of text descriptions. Despite such elaborate documentation, the manuscript is currently of no purpose since deciphering it has not been effectuated even after years of analysis.