Creative Paranoia

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1130832,00.html

Secret of historic code: it's gibberish

Mystery of manuscript that foxed scholars for centuries is solved

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday January 25, 2004
The Observer

It is covered with drawings of fantastic plants, strange symbols and naked 
women.
Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a 
message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a 
civilisation that is thousands of years old.

But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the 
Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is 
filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts 
of the twentieth century's best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval 
scholars.

According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript 
represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that 
made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune 
before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years.

'It was bought by Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia for 600 ducats, an absolute 
fortune for that period,' said Rugg, whose paper on the manuscript is 
published in the journal Cryptologia. 'People clearly thought it contained 
arcane secrets and great knowledge and were prepared to pay to learn them.'

[...]

The manuscript - written on vellum in neat and clear handwriting, 
illustrated with watercolours - is now a prize exhibit at Yale University.

However, those who have attempted to unravel its meaning have had a singular 
lack of success even though they include some of the world's greatest 
codebreakers such as John Tiltman, head of Britain's codebreakers at 
Bletchley Park, and William Friedman, whose team broke the Japanese Purple 
cipher during the Second World War.

The fact that an Elizabethan document could be written in a code that has 
defied a century's attention by the world's greatest code-breakers is the 
most astonishing aspect of this amazing document.

Some of its strange characters look like Roman numbers and Latin letters. 
Others are unlike any symbol seen before. The language seems to have 
structure, however, and forms a pattern, albeit one unlike any other 
language on earth.

Apart from those who believe it is the handiwork of aliens or survivors of 
great lost civilisations, there are cryptologists who claim the Voynich 
manuscript is written in early Ukrainian script while others say it is a 
form of Chinese.

Despite these claims no-one has been able to translate the document. Nor 
have claims that the script is a simple hoax been sustained.

'The manuscript exhibits so much linguistic structure that a hoax appears to 
require almost as much sophistication as an unbreakable code,' says Rugg in 
his paper.

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