![]() (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.) ![]() Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. ![]() Gibbs even identified one image-copied, of course, from another manuscript-of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all it was just shorthand. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.Īfter looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. The manuscript was rediscovered by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 and, since 1969, it's been kept in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, US.Further Reading So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution” Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. It was written in an unknown script by an anonymous author and has no clear purpose. The 15th-century codex is known to be the world's most mysterious book. ![]() “The character of the script, the pronunciation which one needs to get used to, the peculiarity and the vocabulary of the period will cause a lot of trouble even to a native speaker." What exactly is the Voynich Manuscript? "The actual translation of the Voynich-book will need a couple of years work, even if specialists in Hebrew language, who are well versed in mediaeval Hebrew and the terminology of botanical and medical texts, take over the analysis,” he wrote. Spotting a connection between some of the characters and Hebrew specifically, he managed to translate full sentences. These were languages spoken by European scholars of the Middle Ages, as the document dates back to the 15th century. Using this logic, he then concluded, after three years of analysis, that it must be a Semitic language, possibly Arabic, Aramaic or Hebrew. He adds that the word structure leaves only one possible explanation: the manuscript was not composed in an Indo-European language. "A lot of languages were proposed such as Latin, Czech, or amongst others Nahuatl, just to name a few," he wrote in an article explaining his process. The Voynich Manuscript is considered by scholars to be most interesting and mysterious document ever found. However, Hannig, from the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany believes he's figured out the language to be based on Hebrew. The document consists of a mixture of Latin letters, Arabic numbers and other unknown characters. There have been many past attempts to work out what the illustrated codex's unique text says, but all have failed. The German Egyptologist has managed to decipher parts of the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious document stored at Yale University that's made up of elegant handwriting and strange drawings that no one has ever been able to make sense of. Rainer Hannig believes he might have cracked the case that's been baffling scholars for years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |