Strangest fact
A 600-year-old book at Yale is filled with writing in an unknown script and drawings of plants that mostly do not exist. No one can read a single sentence of it.
Why it is odd: Experts have dated it and studied every page, yet its language, author and purpose are still unknown.
The Voynich manuscript is a small book of about 240 vellum pages, vellum being prepared animal skin used for writing. It is filled with flowing writing in an unknown script and colorful drawings. Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it is kept as MS 408, says it was written in an unidentified script by an unknown author and that its meaning has been debated since it appeared on the rare book market in 1912.
The library sorts the drawings into six groups: plants, many of which no one can match to real species; astronomical and astrological drawings; balneological drawings, meaning pictures of bathing, with small naked women in pools and tubes; cosmological medallions, round diagrams of the heavens; pharmaceutical drawings of herbs and roots next to jars; and a final section of text marked with small stars.
Its history can be traced back about 400 years. The Beinecke lists Emperor Rudolf II, who ruled from Prague and collected rare and occult objects, as an early owner who is said to have paid 600 gold ducats for it. In 1666 the scholar Johannes Marcus Marci sent it to Athanasius Kircher in Rome, a famous scholar of the time, hoping he could read it. In 1912 a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich bought it from a Jesuit college near Rome, which is why it carries his name. A later owner, the New York dealer H. P. Kraus, gave it to Yale in 1969.
In 2009 a team led by Greg Hodgins at the University of Arizona cut four tiny strips of vellum from four pages and radiocarbon dated them. Radiocarbon dating measures how much of a slowly fading form of carbon is left in once-living material. The animal skins dated to between 1404 and 1438, about a century earlier than many experts had guessed.
Codebreakers have tried for more than a century, including American military cryptographers in the 20th century. People have announced solutions many times, saying it is a lost language, a code for Latin, a medical handbook, or a hoax made of meaningless symbols. None of these has been accepted by other experts, because no one has shown a method that turns the pages into clear, checkable text.