Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 20, 2004

Hand 1 of the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language. Over its recorded existence, the VMs has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers — including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame — who all failed to decipher a single word. This string of egregious failures has turned the VMs into the Holy Grail of historical cryptology; but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is nothing but an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of random symbols. The book is named after the Russian-American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. It is presently item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University. (more...)

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