In 1912, a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich bought a strange old book in Italy. Inside were about 240 pages of handwritten text in a script nobody could read - full of careful drawings of weird plants, naked figures in tubs, and odd diagrams of stars. Over a hundred years later, the Voynich Manuscript is still unreadable.
Carbon dating has shown the book was made in the early 1400s, somewhere in Europe. The writing flows naturally, like a real language, with patterns that suggest grammar and word order. But the script doesn’t match any known alphabet. The plants in the pictures don’t match any real species. The constellations in the sky charts don’t match any real night sky.
Codebreakers from WWII - including the team that cracked Enigma - have tried and failed. Top computer programs have failed. Every few years, somebody announces they’ve cracked it; every time, experts shoot the claim down. Six hundred years on, the Voynich Manuscript is still the world’s greatest unsolved code.
