Search query: Ancient manuscript deciphering
Video title:  The book is made out of vellum, a specially
treated animal skin, because the 15th century was a less vegan-friendly time. Radiocarbon dating performed on the animal
skin pages shows that they were produced in the early 1400s. The journey of the book in the beginning of
its existence remains somewhat of a mystery. Scholars know that at some point in the early
17th century, the book was owned by a member of the Habsburg court of Rudolf II in Prague,
probably Rudolf himself. From the late 1600s to the late 1800s, it
was stored at the Collegio Romano. This still leaves large lapses in time early
on when the book’s whereabouts and ownership are unaccounted for. Since Voynich re-introduced the book to the
world, academics have argued wildly over what language it may be written in, if the book
is instead a code, or if it’s written in any real language at all. Part of the problem with deciphering the manuscript
is that no one can seem to agree on one theory. The first major hypothesis about the book’s
origins came from academic Joseph Martin Feely, who believed it was the work of medieval scientist
Roger Bacon. He believed that Bacon, for reasons unknown,
chose to write this text in abbreviated medieval Latin encoded in a substitution cipher. Apparently the theory assumed that since this
was before Netflix or the Internet, people had way too much free time on their hands
to write secret code books about plants. There’s a glaring issue with this hypothesis:
while the Voynich manuscript has been dated to the early 1400s, Bacon died in 1292. So unless Bacon faked his own death and lived
to the ripe old age of 200, we can safely dismiss this first theory. In 2016, a natural language processing expert
by the name of Professor Greg Kondrak decided to apply modern artificial intelligence to
try to solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. His findings suggested that the book was actually
written in Hebrew, but in an alphagram code. This type of code rearranges the letters in
each word alphabetically. Kondrak’s computer-assisted translation
of the manuscript read the first sentence of this mysterious book as, “she made recommendations
to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”