READING · 5 MIN

THE BOOK
NO ONE CAN READ.

Roughly 240 pages of vellum, filled with flowing handwriting in an alphabet that matches no known language, and illustrated with plants that don't exist. Codebreakers, linguists and the NSA's own top cryptologist have all tried. Nobody has read a single sentence.

Radiocarbon-dated, not a modern fake ◢

The manuscript is named for Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-American antiquarian book dealer who acquired it in 1912, reportedly among a collection at the Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome. It's been held since 1969 at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which has digitised the entire book and made every page freely viewable online. In 2009, a University of Arizona radiocarbon team dated the vellum itself to 1404-1438 - so whatever it is, it's a genuine 15th-century object, not a Victorian or modern hoax dressed up as one.

A script that follows rules, but breaks all of ours ◢

The text - cryptographers call it “Voynichese” - uses somewhere between 20 and 30 distinct glyph shapes, written left to right in a flowing, confident hand with no corrections or hesitation marks, as if the scribe already knew exactly what they were writing. Statistically it behaves like real language: word lengths, letter-frequency patterns and repetition all resemble natural text far more than random noise, the kind of internal structure you'd expect from something built on a simple, consistent rule - not unlike working out an unfamiliar alphabet one symbol at a time. But it matches no known language, living or dead, and no proposed key has ever produced a translation that other researchers can independently reproduce.

Herbs that don't exist, and figures in green pools ◢

The illustrations are almost stranger than the text. A long “herbal” section draws plants with roots, leaves and flowers that don't match any known species. An astronomical section shows circular zodiac-style diagrams. A “balneological” section - the strangest of all - shows dozens of small nude female figures standing or sitting in green pools, connected by a network of pipes and tubes. A final short section is text-only, its paragraphs marked with little star-like bullets, as if it were a list or set of recipes. None of the imagery has ever been matched to a known 15th-century scientific or herbal tradition.

The world's best codebreaker couldn't crack it either ◢

William Friedman, the cryptologist who led the American team that broke Japan's PURPLE cipher machine in World War II, spent decades of his career on the Voynich manuscript on and off, running a small study group on it into the 1960s. He eventually leaned toward it being an attempt at a constructed, universal philosophical language rather than an encrypted natural one - a theory, not a solution. In 2004, researcher Gordon Rugg proposed the opposite extreme: that a 16th-century hoaxer could have generated Voynichese-looking gibberish mechanically, using a table-and-grille method, to sell a fake “ancient” book to a wealthy buyer with no real content inside at all. Neither the language theory nor the hoax theory has been proven, and several claimed “decipherments” since - including a widely reported 2019 claim that it was written in an early form of proto-Romance - have been rejected by the wider academic community for not holding up when checked line by line.

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