The Mystery Manuscript

The sole copy of a 240-page book is hidden away in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Its vellum pages, recently carbon dated to be approximately 1420, have looping handwriting and hand-drawn imagery that appear to have been lifted from a dream. The narrative is accompanied by illustrations of real and imagined vegetation, floating castles, bathing women, zodiac rings, suns and moons with faces, and astrology diagrams.
The Voynich manuscript, which measures 24 by 16 centimeters, is one of history's greatest mysteries. The cause is? Nobody can decipher what it says. The manuscript was discovered by Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich in a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912, giving the document its name.
He was bewildered. The author? Where did it get made? What do these strange phrases and colorful images mean? What mysteries do its pages hold? He bought the manuscript from the poor college priest and eventually transported it to the United States, where scholars have been trying to figure it out for more than a century.
According to cryptographers, the writing exhibits all the traits of a legitimate language, albeit one that has never been observed before. The Voynich manuscript's language features patterns that you wouldn't discover from a random letter generator, which gives it the appearance of reality. In real languages, letters and groupings of letters appear with predictable frequencies. Beyond that, we only have access to what is visible.
The letters come in a variety of styles and sizes. Some are lifted directly from other scripts, but most are original. Gallows characters are the names given to the taller letters. The entire manuscript is richly embellished with scroll-like decorations. It seems to have been written by two or more people, while a third person painted it.
Three major hypotheses regarding the manuscript's text have surfaced over time.
The first is that it is written in cipher, a secret language that is specifically intended to conceal hidden meaning.
The second is that the document is a scam intended to take advantage of an unsuspecting buyer, written in nonsense. Some people think the writer was a medieval con artist. Others claimed that Voynich was involved.
The document may be written in a real language but in an unidentified script, according to the third hypothesis.
Perhaps the goal of medieval scholars was to develop an alphabet for a spoken but unwritten language. In that case, the Voynich manuscript might be like the Easter Island-created rongorongo writing, which is now unintelligible because the culture that created it has vanished.
The Voynich manuscript cannot be read, but that hasn't prevented people from speculating as to what it might contain. Some assume that the text could be an encyclopedia containing the knowledge of the culture that generated it, while others think it was an attempt to develop a new type of written language. Others think it was penned by the Elizabethan mystic John Dee who used divination and alchemy or by the 13th-century scholar Roger Bacon, who sought to comprehend the fundamental rules of grammar.
More far-fetched hypotheses claim that the book was written by Martians or even a coven of Italian witches.
Scientists have just provided some insight into the riddle after struggling with it for 100 years. The carbon dating method was the first innovation. Additionally, according to modern historians, the book may have been given to Jacobus Sinapius, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II's physician, in 1612 after traveling via Rome and Prague.
A couple of the words in the manuscript's vocabulary have also lately been tentatively identified, in addition to these historical breakthroughs. Could the letters next to these seven stars spell Tauran, the name of the constellation Taurus that contains the Pleiades of seven stars?
Could the plant in the image, a Centaurea, be described by the word "Centaurus"?
Maybe, but development moves slowly. What could we discover if we can decipher its code?
A 15th-century illustrator's dream diary?
ridiculous nonsense?
or the misplaced wisdom of a vanished civilization?
What do you suppose it to be?