The Voynich Manuscript has received a fair amount of attention over the years. Named after the Polish book dealer who purchased the codex in 1912, the 15th-century script is written in an unknown language, with many experts debating whether it is a hoax or a complex code over the years. But now a group of computer scientists believe they may have gotten to the bottom of it.
Greg Kondrak and Bradley Hauer of the University of Alberta have been using statistic translation software to understand the text, even deciphering the first sentence of the manuscript. Their technique involves creating a series of algorithms that can decipher unknown alphabetic scripts, turning to the Voynich Manuscript to test it out.
Dozens of attempts to decode the text have failed over the years. The team who deciphered the Nazi Enigma code tried and failed to decipher it. At one point Nicholas Gibbs claimed it was written in an abbreviated form of Latin and translated to be a women's health manual, although this was debunked.
Now, this team believe it is written in Hebrew, in a code that removes vowels and shuffles consonants. The computer scientist duo used 400 different
languages to algorithmically identify the underlying language of the manuscript, which has appeared across popular culture due to its historical significance, turning up in everything from the Indiana Jones movies to the Assassin's Creed video games.
While they initially thought it was written in Arabic, they were astounded to find that it was written in Hebrew. "That was surprising," says Kondrak. "And just saying 'this is Hebrew' is the first step. The next step is how do we decipher it." The first sentence is believed to read:
"She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people"
Another short section was found to include the Hebrew words for 'narrow', 'farmer', 'light', 'air', and 'fire', leading the team to believe that it is a medieval herbal guide. Kondrak has stated that the software is around 96 per cent accurate, and that 80 per cent of the words were found to be in Hebrew, leading them to believe that experts in the language may make sense out of it.
"It came up with a sentence that is grammatical, and you can interpret it. It's a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense.
"Somebody with very good knowledge of Hebrew and who’s a historian at the same time could take this evidence and follow this kind of clue."
Despite the developments made, Kondrak says that the results "could be interpreted either as tantalizing clues for Hebrew as the source language of the VMS, or simply as artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming and language models." Regardless, it looks like we are one step closer to unearthing one of history's greatest
mysteries.
