THE WORLD'S MOST MYSTERIOUS BOOK: THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT

The medieval Voynich Manuscript is a book describing, in an unknown alphabet and coded language, a seemingly extraterrestrial flora, fauna, anatomy, architecture, and strange objects. Today, the mystery is still unsolved.

Considered the world's most mysterious book, the manuscript consists of 240 pages of ciphertext written in a complex, unknown language accompanied by bizarre diagrams and illustrations. The original is preserved today in Yale University's Bainecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

Since the day it came to light, there have been hundreds of claims made by many people, from cryptographers of the American army to respected academics and curious researchers, but the book still remains a mystery. The author and the original name of the book are unknown. It is named after the Polish book collector Wilfrid Voynich, who found it in a second-hand bookshop in 1912 and announced it to the world so that it could be deciphered.

When Voynich found the manuscript, it contained a letter dated 1666. This is a letter written by the botanist Johannes Marcus to the German philosopher, inventor and linguist Athanasius Kircher. Holy Roman Emperor II. Marcus, Rudolph's botanist, asked him to decipher this manuscript—probably to the emperor—for a hefty fee. But neither Kircher nor the master cryptographers who came after him could find the mysterious codes of the book, its strange plants, and what the symbols meant. Numerous theories have been produced about the meaning, origin and author of the book: Some have suggested that only a genius who observed nature like Leonardo da Vinci wrote the book; some have said that only an autistic monk could have written those strange, scrambled texts. There are even those who claim that it is written in the language of angels and that its source is not the world. There are those who are not convinced that it is a real manuscript, but think that it is a hoax and an exaggerated joke, but phonetics and language experts have revealed that the words in the text have a spelling system and have a harmony.

In the first part, there are lots of plant pictures and intricate, unreadable writings underneath. Some plants in this section could not be identified; It looks like it was drawn imaginatively. It is not possible to predict whether it belongs to an existing plant or not. In the second part of the manuscript, on the pages that expand when folded; There are some astrological or astronomical figures that suggest they are the sun, the moon, and the planets, showing the cycle of the seasons or the time of harvest. In the third part, which is getting more and more bizarre, female figures depicted naked in the middle of a green river; strange connections that we can't understand what unite those human figures; there are pictures of veins, arms, suspicious animals whose fauna is unknown. The fourth part is thought to be devoted to some prescriptions made with medicinal plants. In the fifth section, which is similar to a summary or an index, there are short explanations;

Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, who has worked on Voynich for a long time, said in an interview with CNN last June that the book was thought to belong to the 13th century, the mysterious character of that time, the alchemist and magician Roger Bacon, until carbon tests were carried out. After carbon tests and ink analysis carried out in 2011, it was determined that the parchments belonged to the early 15th century, or more precisely between 1404-1438. The book, which disappeared for 250 years after that date, apparently reached Voynich after traveling all over Europe. Voynich did not give any information about how he got the book while he was alive, but after his death, his wife said that he bought the book from a second-hand bookshop outside of Rome, from the Jesuits.

This dating makes it clear that the book belongs neither to Bacon, nor to da Vinci, nor to Voynich himself. But the veil of mystery is still not fully opened. Davis tells that there are people who are obsessed with deciphering the code and lose their wealth and family for this cause. News such as "Russians solved the manuscript", "Artificial intelligence solved Voynich's mystery", "Mysterious language is actually ancient Turkish". One of the new claims is made by computer scientists working at the University of Alberta, Canada. Researchers say that the artificial intelligence they developed has managed to solve the 600-year-old mystery of the book. They say they translated sections of the manuscript using a technique called algorithmic deciphering. They claim that after testing their algorithm on 380 different translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were able to decode the originals with 97 percent accuracy. They came to the view that ciphering could be a kind of anagram, in which the letters in the words are arranged alphabetically, mixed and reordered according to a certain rule, and there are no vowels in it. “It turned out that more than 80 percent of the words are in Hebrew dictionaries,” Greg Kondrak, a Comparative Linguistics expert, told The Canadian Press. But we didn't know that these words would mean anything when they were put together," he says. He adds that in the first part of the 'Plants' section of the Voynich manuscript, which includes various plant species, there are many botanical terms "such as farmer, light, air, and fire."

In their scientific paper published in Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, the research team says that the help of ancient Hebrew historians is needed to take the decryption process further and avoid algorithmically generated misinterpretations. however, he can evaluate this evidence and follow a clue. By examining these texts closely, he can decipher what the message is,” they add.

After the University of Alberta, there is another interesting claim that comes from a family from Canada, but this time from Turkey and Azerbaijan. Electrical engineer Ahmet Ardıç, who also worked on linguistics for many years, published a video explaining his theories in February 2018 with his two sons, Ozan and Alp. Junipers are an ancient dialect called Ata Turkish by Voynich elys or a combination of different dialects; They claim that it was written in an alphabet that reads as it is written. Oğul Ozan Ardıç explains that they deciphered 300 words in the video and that this may be enough to understand 30 percent of the manuscript. They say that the book contains detailed information about medicinal prescriptions, ointments, especially on the pages with the naked female figures I mentioned earlier, there are advices about abortion or how to eat to give birth to a boy, and they invite other linguists to help solve all the pages of the book.