Study unravels secrets of history’s ‘most mysterious manuscript’
New study may have solved mystery of Voynich manuscript
- A new study suggests the Voynich manuscript, written in an unknown script sometime in the 1400s, could be a type of encrypted message.
- Science journalist Michael Greshko created the 'Naibbe cipher', a new encryption designed to be historically plausible for 1400s scribes.
- This homophonic substitution cipher can be done entirely by hand using 15th-century materials and encrypts Latin or Italian text.
- The Naibbe cipher reliably reproduces many key statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript, including specific rules for word formation and character appearance.
- The findings indicate that the Voynich manuscript likely encrypts real words rather than gibberish, bolstering claims that it is a ciphertext.