Skip to comments.Secret of Voynich Manuscript, an Ancient Book Written in 'Alien' Code, Partly Revealed
Posted on 02/12/2011 2:01:35 PM PST by FTJM
Part of the mystery behind an 'alien' book no one can read has at last been unraveled.
Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript is among literature's great mysteries. The book of aging parchment is written in alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, and arranged into what appear to be words and sentences -- except they don't resemble anything written or read by human beings.
And for decades, the manuscript has mystified scientists.
"Is it a code, a cipher of some kind?" asked Greg Hodgins, a physicist with the University of Arizona. "People are doing statistical analysis of letter use and word use -- the tools that have been used for code breaking. But they still haven't figured it out," Hodgins said.
The DaVinci Code was fiction. The Voynich manuscript is real -- and its code remains one of history's biggest mysteries. But at least Hodgins has solved part of the mystery behind the book: it's age.
Because the parchment pages of the Voynich manuscript were made from animal skin, they can be radiocarbon-dated. Hodgins, a chemist and archaeological scientist, used radiocarbon dating on tiny bits of the pages extracted with a scalpel to determine that the book dates back to the early 15th century, making it a century older than scholars had previously thought.
Carbon-14 dating places the book's creation to between 1404 and 1438, in the early Renaissance. It's not the oldest book in the world -- that would be The Diamond Sutra, a seven-page scroll printed with wood blocks on paper in China around 1,300 years ago. But it's older than the Gutenberg bible, the first book printed with modern presses, which rolled off the line in 1453.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Older than moveable type presses.
Possible the thing might be in old Prussian or some other Baltic language??
It says that the Voynich - which is a manuscript - is not the "oldest book" but that the Diamond Sutra - which is a printed work - is the oldest.
The Diamond Sutra is a very young book if we're talking both printed and manuscript works.
IT’S A COOKBOOK!!
You have to read it in a mirror. The code is decipherable then. It says Obama Sucks.
Let Michelle have a look at it. It might be Wookiee.
( apologies to the Wookiee race, I couldn’t resist)
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It seems a 500 year old PRACTICAL JOKE at worse, or a product of a delusional or otherwise unusual mind at best.
Someone did go through a lot of trouble and effort, though.
Vulcan Language Dictionary
Also this dating only shows when the pages were made
not when the book was written/printed.
It’s Hamlet in the original Klingon, right?
There are some really strange drawings in this old book.
I think the 'author' was trying to impress young ladies with his knowledge and 'fancies' and had the means to procure the right drawing equipment to record it all on paper.
It was all made up. But then, that's how everything we know started.
The reason we can’t ‘translate’ it is because the author was just writing gibberish around the pictures, to impress the ladies who listened to his fanciful tales about what he had drawn and written in the book. It is very likely none of them could read anyway.
The Book of Kells is much older than A.D. 1400. The earliest manuscripts of the Bible in “codex” form (in the form of a book rather than a scroll) date from the fourth and fifth centuries. There are papyrus scraps of ancient Greek authors that date back much earlier than that, and Egyptian papyrus texts that are much older. Some may date back to the second or third millennium B.C., I’m not sure.
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