It’s been called the world’s most mysterious book. It was written between 1404 and 1438 in an unknown script by an unknown author. It’s illustrated with plants and star charts that look tantalizingly like real ones, only not quite. And then there are the women - dozens of naked women entering and emerging from tubes that one writer compared to midieval waterslides. But most perplexing of all is the lettering, which is beautifully formed but completely unintelligible.
"It looks like a western script, but when you look at the individual strokes of the letters, it's not any language we know," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. "Because we don't know where the individual letters begin and end, we don't really know even the basis for the alphabet."
The book is known as the Voynich Manuscript - not for the man who wrote it, but rather, for the rare book dealer who once owned it. Some of the best cryptographers in the world have tried to decipher it and have been defeated. Six hundred years after its author laid down his pen, nobody knows what he was trying to say.
"I love the fact that it so far has resisted our ability to decode it," said Clemens. "There is something wonderfully human about our desire to do puzzles, especially puzzles that other humans have set for us."
And just because it hasn't been cracked yet, that doesn't mean scientists aren't still working on it. Clemens says there are advances every year, in both linguistics and material sciences.
"For example, we know only that the manuscript was made out of calf," he explained. "But, at the moment, there are people .. that are helping to determine what breeds of individual animals the parchment was from and they'll be able to localize that."
In the meantime, the entire manuscript has been re-printed so that everyone can take a crack at uncovering the meaning behind the mysterious pictures and script. But, be forewarned, experts like Clemens have already fielded plenty of theories - from aliens, to a monk who discovered LSD five hundred years early (my own personal contribution). You'll have to be creative.