World's most mysterious book could be hiding a secret message encoded using a cypher

The Voynich Manuscript, described as the world's most mysterious book, could be a cypher from the early 15th century, according to a fresh analysis. This text has remained an enigma among archaeologists, with its strange illustrations of plants, an unknown script, diagrams linked to astrology, castles and human figures. Decoding it has remained impossible, and no one has been able to explain what the text is about or who wrote it. Scientists continue to be intrigued by it, and now a fresh study has offered an explanation for its content, albeit not fully. A recent peer-reviewed study published in Cryptologia states that a scribe likely used a real historical cypher-like method to produce text that looks like Voynichese.

Science journalist Michael Greshko tried to test whether a historically realistic encryption system could have been used to generate the characters and unusual statistical features seen in the Voynich Manuscript. He developed a method named the "Naibbe cypher". Instead of decoding the manuscript, the cypher goes backwards, and tries to see whether the system creates the same characters and items seen in the book. It picks ordinary Latin or Italian text and turns it into glyph sequences that closely resemble Voynichese.

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How the cypher works?

For this purpose, the cypher breaks continuous text into short groupings of letters and substitutes them with elements of randomness. It uses structured tables for this, and the randomness is introduced through tools such as dice and playing cards. Both these objects were widely available in the 15th century.

The Naibbe cypher was applied to various samples, and many of the key properties of the Voynich Manuscript, such as the frequency of symbols, the typical length of “words,” and certain positional patterns, matched with the results. It also allowed for the original linguistic structure to be retained in the form of short letter sequences. The study upholds the cypher hypothesis that has been proposed in the past as well. It also offers a cypher that would have looked like the original system used back then. However, the Voynich Manuscript remains undeciphered with still no viable explanation for its creation.