Are you a fan of ciphers and codes? Are you tired of solving said puzzles? Then the Voynich Manuscript is right down your alley.
The Voynich Manuscript is thought to be written in the late 15th century and is named after a man who had purchased it in the 1900's. It appears to be written in a coherent language with a pattern, but the efforts of codebreakers and linguists have all failed to make heads or tails of the content.
The Voynich Manuscript greatly resembles herbal books written around the same era, but none of the plants depicted match any known plant species living or dead. Also, there seems to be some illustrations with imagery in some sort of mystic tradition that isn't known to anyone living or in the history books.
Many theories exist as to what the manuscript is about ranging from random letters to a complex cipher that is uncrackable without access to the codex it was written with.
What else is little known is the efforts of a German linguist named Heinrich R. Franz to the deciphering of the book. He worked alone and proclaimed to have cracked the code to the manuscript back in 1989. However, he refused to release the key, and ended up dying in a fire in early 1990.
As he worked on the text from the time he received photocopies of the manuscript till his death in 1990 he was said to become more and more withdrawn and was thought to be suffering from early onset dementia.
He did release a few details to the public. He said that the manuscript was a double-negative substitution cipher and that it related to plants that were native to Austrailia and New Zealand before they were wiped out.
No one is for sure what the content of the text was, and if Heinrich was telling the truth or if he was a crazy man telling lies to gain attention.
