![the voynich manuscript alphabet the voynich manuscript alphabet](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180613135227-voynich-manuscript-9-exlarge-169.jpg)
But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
#The voynich manuscript alphabet code
".Despite numerous attempts to crack the code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have long remained a mystery.
![the voynich manuscript alphabet the voynich manuscript alphabet](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8f/48/c0/8f48c00a1d08ab93471a89bc498cb78e--ancient-scripts-glyphs.jpg)
Inset right is an unidentified botanical illustration from the manuscript. From the New Yorker article: The Unread: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, (2013) by Reed Johnson. The writing flows smoothly hesitation from one letter to the next based on the handwriting, it’s thought to be the work of at least two and as many as eight practiced scribes, and possibly required years of labor."
![the voynich manuscript alphabet the voynich manuscript alphabet](https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/images/1/10/Voynich_Text.jpg)
Judging by its illustrations, the manuscript seems to be a compendium of knowledge related to the natural world, including a section about herbs, a section apparently detailing biological processes, various zodiac charts, and pages devoted to the movements of celestial bodies, such as the transit of the moon across the Pleiades. What these glyphs signify-whether they represent phonetic information or numeric values or something else-is anyone’s guess. That’s because the book-called the Voynich manuscript after the rare-book dealer who stumbled upon it a century ago-is written in an unknown script, with an alphabet that appears nowhere other than in its pages. But perhaps the oddest thing about this book is that no one has ever read it. (Click on the images to expand.) Tentacled balls of roots take the forms of animals, or of human organs-in one case, sprouting two disembodied heads with vexed expressions. The manuscript’s botanical drawings are no less strange: the plants appear to be chimerical, combining incompatible parts from different species, even different kingdoms. With their distended bellies, stick-like arms and legs, and earnest expressions, the naked figures have a whimsical quality, though their anatomy is frankly rendered-something unusual for the period. ".These illustrations range from the fanciful (legions of heavy-headed flowers that bear no relation to any earthly variety) to the bizarre (naked and possibly pregnant women, frolicking in what look like amusement-park waterslides from the fifteenth century).