The manuscript has been housed at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University since 1969. One particularly curious passage shows dozens of naked women bathing in pools of interconnected green liquid. The renderings show doodles of castles and dragons along with diagrams of plants, planets, naked figures, and astronomical symbols, all detailed in green, brown, yellow, blue, and red ink. There are gaps in the page numbers and evidence that it could have been rebound at some point, so the order of the pages today may be different than they were when the book was published.Īn elegant, looping script of 25 to 30 characters runs from left to right in short paragraphs down the pages, interspersed with detailed illustrations. It doesn't include an index but likely had foldouts that have long since gone missing. Written in Central Europe in the 15th century, the book is slightly larger than a modern paperback and contains 246 fragile pages of bound vellum, or script-ready animal skin. The Voynich Manuscript is likely what cryptologists call a cipher, or a coded pattern of letters.
Voynich manuscript book code#
In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, computing scientists from the University of Alberta used an algorithm to try to decode parts of the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book written in an undecipherable code with an unknown language.īut other scholars are skeptical, and the manuscript remains a document very much shrouded in mystery. A pair of Canadian codebreakers may have deciphered a 600-year-old book that has been baffling cryptologists for centuries.