Unreadable Voynich Manuscript Might Have Been Cracked

Stephen Bax, who currently works as a linguistics professor at the University of Bedfordshire in England, claims to have decoded part of a manuscript said to be the world's most mysterious.

The 250-page book in question is known as the Voynich manuscript, and it was discovered by an antique book dealer back in 1912.

It is estimated to date back to the 15th century, and it is written in a weird language that does not appear in any other document.

What's more, it is embellished with drawings of human figures, zodiac signs and medicinal herbs, as shown in the picture next to this article.

Consequently, researchers are having a tough time making head and tail of it. Because of the manuscript's unreadability, it was even said that it might be some sort of a hoax, and not a real historic document.

However, in 2013, a paper in the journal PLOS ONE showed that the Voynich manuscript is organized according to well documented linguistic rules, and must therefore contain an actual message.

Now, Professor Stephen Bax says that, after he successfully deciphered 14 characters present in the script, he managed to decode 10 of the words included in the manuscript.

According to Live Science, some of these words mean coriander, hellebore, and juniper, and are written next to drawings of these types of plants.

“I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script,” the professor explains.

“The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants. I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at medieval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results,” he adds.

Even if Stephen Bax has indeed managed to accurately decode some of the words in the Voynich manuscript, there is little denying that it will be a while before the book's content is revealed in its entirety.