New research is offering a fresh way to think about one of history’s most enduring enigmas: the Voynich Manuscript. Long described as the world’s most mysterious book, the early 15th-century manuscript is filled with an unknown script and strange illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, castles, and human figures. Despite more than a century of analysis, no one has convincingly explained who wrote it, what it says, or even whether its text carries meaning at all.
A recent peer-reviewed study published in Cryptologia does not claim to solve the mystery, but it shows that the manuscript could plausibly have been produced using a cipher that was within medieval technological capabilities. The work was conducted by science journalist Michael Greshko, who wanted to test whether a historically realistic encryption system could generate text with the same unusual statistical features seen in the Voynich Manuscript.
The outcome is a proposed method, termed the “Naibbe cipher,” the name derived from a medieval Italian card game. Instead of decoding the manuscript, the cipher goes the opposite way: It takes ordinary Latin or Italian text and turns it into glyph sequences that closely resemble Voynichese. It does this by breaking continuous text up into short groupings of letters and then substituting them using structured tables, with elements of randomness introduced through tools such as dice and playing cards—objects that were widely available in 15th-century Europe.
Applied to a variety of sample texts, the Naibbe cipher produces outputs that match many of the key properties of the Voynich Manuscript: the frequency of symbols, the typical length of “words,” and certain positional patterns that have long driven academics to perplexity. What is more, the method preserves fragments of the original linguistic structure in the form of short letter sequences, even though no single glyph consistently corresponds to a single plaintext letter.
The results indicate that the long-debated “cipher hypothesis” remains viable. The study simultaneously constrains what such a cipher would have looked like: any real system underlying the manuscript was highly complex and quite unlike conventional substitution ciphers. The research also allows for competing interpretations, saying that the text shows a constructed system, an unknown language, or even an elaborate forgery.
Experts not involved in the study have welcomed the work as a useful benchmark, not a definitive answer. The research serves to sharpen the questions future studies must address by showing that a hand-executable cipher can replicate many of the manuscript’s quirks. For now, the Voynich Manuscript remains undeciphered, but the new approach offers a clearer framework for understanding how such a baffling text might have been created and why it continues to resist simple explanations.
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Sounds like a race of knowledge to consider, how old and rare these types of text can be is really remarkable to see the historic aspect of this is fantastic.
I thought it was published that a line of the text had yielded a Hebrew based language translation ” the herbs were not correct for the lady of the house and the master of the house was not pleased ” or to my memory something the like….Is it likely more than one language is in use? Maybe a fancy medieval game, for a prince or princess, involving cards, dice, and a beautiful manual of sorts!
I read where this was thought to be from a dead language. If so, why hadnt anyone used A.I. to translate it like they are doing on the dead sea scrolls.
I wonder if they’ve compared the handwriting to known geniuses from history. I could see this being a creation of DaVinci or the like.
I have always felt it is either a work of alchemy or, given the numerous illustrations of what appear to be pregnant ladies, some sort of medical book, perhaps dealing with “female problems”.
What I am writing to you here at the moment is very important. And for all scientists, cryptanalysts, linguists and codebreakers. The Voynich manuscript is written in the old Czech language. The entire manuscript is encrypted with a special Homophonic Substitution. Which was used quite a lot in the Middle Ages. Specifically, it is: The Kabbalistic numerological system of Gematria, in which each character and therefore letter has its own numerical value. The author shows this Homophonic Substitution on folio 2r. That is, right at the beginning of the manuscript. Anyone who does not know this Homophonic Substitution will never be able to decipher the text of the manuscript. Every scientist who knows and understands what Homophonic Substitution means should be able to understand this successfully. So if the text is based on homophonic substitution, then all frequency analyses are wrong and therefore can never find out what is actually written in the text of the manuscript. Next, what is important. So of course, this is knowledge of the old Czech language. Anyone who doesn’t know the old Czech language will never be able to understand what is written in the text of the manuscript. In the text of the manuscript, this warning is written on several pages: I am writing in Czech. Or it is written there: Czech words. So these are the two main conditions for some clever scientist to be able to decipher the text of the Voynich manuscript.
Based on my professional experience as a doctor and my studies in the areas of Alchemy and Mysticism, the conclusion I have reached seems unique so far, but at the same time the most probable: Whoever wrote and illustrated this Voynich Manuscript was a schizophrenic with delusional ideas who decided to publish it as if it were new or secret knowledge! I study many things, including Ufology, and I participated in a Ufology Congress where one of the speakers wrote a book recounting his trip to Saturn’s moons, and he wrote in the book the languages of those peoples and spoke them fluently! The strongest evidence in this regard is the total absence of the drawn plans and the inconsistency of the written language: they have no logic or coherence, which may demonstrate the author’s psychotic episode!
This is not old Czech with homophonic substitution. That theory has been tested since the 1920s and is false. The text of this manuscript meaningless. I can clearly see this based on the repetition of text, which doesn’t occur in natural, meaningful language. If there is a language behind these glyphs, it’s been long proven not to be Czech.
William F. Friedman and his team in the 1940s and 1950s determined that the text was not generated by a substitution cipher.
In 1976, Prescott Currier demonstrated that the manuscript text does not fit that of any natural language.
In 2007, Jorge Stolfi and Gabriel Landini determined that text was generated based off of neighboring text by changing a glyph here and there.
In 2013, Marcelo Montemurro and Damián Zanette published a paper showing that the Voynich text has some statistical similarities to natural language. But later they demonstrated that this effect can also be produced using meaningless text.
In 2016, Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner were able to generate similar meaningless text using an algorithmic approach that would’ve been used in the manuscripts creation.
The Cryptologia paper shows that Voynichese-like text was technologically doable in the 1400s. But it doesn’t show that the Voynich Manuscript contains understandable content. This study narrows the field of possible explanations to show that it’s not as if the cipher is too difficult to crack therefore it must be a modern, uncrackable cipher. It shows that its creation was feasible in the 1400s using techniques other than cipher.