The Early 15th-Century Manuscript Written in a Script That No One Has Read in Six Hundred Years

The Voynich Manuscript is Beinecke MS 408, a 240-page illuminated codex held by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It is written in an unknown script — approximately 25 to 30 distinct glyphs that recur in patterns consistent with natural-language word and sentence structure — and illustrated with botanical drawings of plants that match no known species, astronomical diagrams that match no known star catalogue, and approximately 100 nude female figures bathing in interconnected tubs of green liquid.

No one has produced a translation that the scholarly cryptographic community accepts.

Provenance

The earliest documented owner is Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who paid 600 gold ducats for the manuscript in Prague around 1586. Rudolf was a serious collector of occult and alchemical materials; the seller has been variously identified as the English mathematician John Dee and the alchemist Edward Kelley, but the documentary evidence is circumstantial.

The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher received the manuscript in Rome around 1666 from a correspondent who described it as having been purchased by Rudolf. Kircher was the leading European authority on Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic. He could not read it. The manuscript stayed in Jesuit hands at the Villa Mondragone in Frascati until it was sold in 1912 to the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich.

Voynich publicised the manuscript through 1916–1930 and tried unsuccessfully to sell it. His widow inherited it in 1930. It was donated to the Beinecke in 1969.

What the carbon dating settled

For most of the 20th century the leading theories had been that the manuscript was either a 16th-century deliberate fabrication (possibly by Edward Kelley to defraud Rudolf II) or a 13th-century work by Roger Bacon. The Roger Bacon theory had been popularised by the William Newbold “translation” of 1921 and demolished by John Manly’s 1931 response.

Radiocarbon dating of four vellum samples at the University of Arizona in 2009 produced calibrated dates between 1404 and 1438 with 95 percent confidence. This eliminates both the Bacon theory (too early) and the Kelley-forgery theory (too late). The vellum is genuine early 15th-century. The ink chemistry is consistent with the same period.

The Voynich Manuscript is a genuine early 15th-century document in an unknown script.

What the script appears to be

Statistical analysis of the script — Zipf’s law, conditional entropy, word-length distribution — produces results consistent with natural language and inconsistent with random gibberish. The script behaves like a real language. Specific properties (low conditional entropy compared to most European languages, near-absence of word repetition across long passages) match no known natural-language family.

The leading 21st-century theories propose that it is a constructed language, a phonetic transcription of an unidentified non-European source language, or a substitution cipher on a real language with the plaintext systematically reordered. Each theory has produced partial translations; none has produced a translation that other Voynich researchers can replicate.

The Voynich Manuscript has been read by no one in approximately six hundred years.