Historians can’t figure out how this ancient book is written in a language no one has ever seen. The truth is that large portions of history will forever be missing and that’s what makes something like the Voynich Manuscript so incredibly fascinating. This mysterious text, believed to have been written some time in the early 15th century, is written in a language no one has ever seen before, or since. On top of that, it’s full of illustrations of plants and animals that have never existed, at least not according to any known scientific records. The book was first brought to the attention of modern scholars by Wilfred Voynich, a Polish book dealer who acquired the text in 1912. Voynich became obsessed with discovering the origins of the manuscript, which was written in a language neither he nor anyone else had ever seen before. The 240-page text is written left-to-right, and features hundreds of inexplicable illustrations. The pages have been carbon-dated to the early 15th century, probably sometime between 1404–1438. The book is believed to have been made somewhere in what is now northern Italy. There are hundreds of theories surrounding the manuscript’s language. Some believe that it’s simply a familiar European tongue rendered incomprehensible by a cipher that has yet to be found. Others believe that the text itself is a kind of code, though they don’t know what for. Some have even suggested that the manuscript is a remnant from a lost civilization. The book’s illustrations are a mystery as well. They are divided into six fairly distinct categories, ranging from astrological, to herbal, to biological and yet the plants and objects depicted on the pages seem to have no basis in reality. Some even suspect that they’re depictions of alien technology. Almost everything we know about the book’s history and record of ownership comes from a letter found inside the cover, written in 1666. It says that the book had at one point passed through the hands of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and then his gardener, Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz. There are also many theories regarding the book’s author. They range from occult Renaissance figure Edward Kelley to mathematician John Dee, who supposedly sold the text to Emperor Rudolf sometime around 1600. We may never know where this mysterious text came from or what its purpose was.
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