Has Yale’s mysterious Voynich Manuscript finally been deciphered? | The Art Newspaper

A page from the Voynich Manuscript.
Photo: Public Domain.

Will the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th century document kept at Yale University and known as the world’s most mysterious book, finally reveal its secrets?

Any attempts to decipher the manuscript's unique text, made up of a mixture of handwritten Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and unknown characters, have so far failed. Because of the many mysteries surrounding its content, it has featured in TV shows, books, music, and even video games. Now, after three years of analysis, the German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig from the Roemer -und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, believes he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript's language to be based on Hebrew.

“Countless decipherment attempts were made,” Hannig writes in an article in German explaining his methodology. “A lot of languages were proposed, such as Latin, Czech, or amongst others Nahuatl (spoken by the Aztecs), just to name a few... The word-structure leaves only one possible explanation: the manuscript was not composed in an Indo-European language.”

To read the full article, click here: Has Yale’s mysterious Voynich Manuscript finally been deciphered?