What do you think of this fact?
Some books are hard to read. And then there’s the Voynich manuscript. Nobody has been able to read it for centuries, not even the experts.
A book full of questions
The manuscript is kept at Yale University in the US and runs to about 240 pages. It’s written in a script that doesn’t appear anywhere else, in a language nobody knows.
Then there are the pictures, which only deepen the mystery. They show growths that look like plants but can’t be clearly matched to any known species. There are drawings that resemble lab equipment, cosmic symbols and women in bathing pools. Whether it’s an herbal, a secret code or an elaborate joke, nobody knows.
A look in the lab
At least the age now has an answer. In 2009, a team at the University of Arizona led by Greg Hodgins took four very thin strips of vellum from pages that had probably never been rebound. Using an accelerator mass spectrometer, the researchers dated the material.
The result: the vellum dates from between 1404 and 1438. That makes the manuscript about 100 years older than many had assumed. So it’s a genuine early 15th-century manuscript, not a later fake on new material.
Bonus fact: The dating needed only strips about an inch long. The book itself was left practically untouched.
Its age doesn’t tell us what’s inside, though. Cryptographers, linguists and amateur sleuths have all tried. According to Medievalists.net, nobody has cracked it so far.
A book that has lasted 600 years without giving away a single secret. Respect.