🌀📖The Book No One Can Read : The Voynich Mystery 📖🔐

Do you remember The Story of Language? Human beings have always wanted to share ideas.

We speak. We listen. We tell stories. We ask questions. We make jokes. We warn each other. We teach each other. 🗣️👂✨ But spoken words have one problem. They disappear. You say something and seconds later—💨—the sound is gone. If your friends were not around when you said it, they will never know exactly what you said. So human beings had a problem. They needed to find a way to make their words stay.

They made marks. They drew pictographs. They invented signs and symbols. Across different places and different times, human beings experimented with many kinds of writing systems. Some used pictures, some used symbols for words or syllables, and some developed alphabets in which signs represented sounds. ✍️📜

And something extraordinary happened. A thought could travel through time.

Imagine writing your thoughts on a little slip of paper, putting it inside a bottle, sealing it tightly and throwing it into the sea. 🌊🍾 The bottle might bob over waves, drift past islands and wash onto a beach many years later. Someone you have never met could open it and read your words.

Your voice was not there.
You were not there.
But your thought arrived. ⏳✨

A writing system works because people share an understanding of the signs. If I make this sign, A, you recognise it. We agree that this shape has a name and can represent a particular sound. If I put together C-A-T, you can read those three signs and suddenly a little furry animal might appear in your imagination. 🐈 Look what has happened! A thought has travelled from my mind 🧠➡️✍️ onto the page 📖➡️👀 and into your mind🧠 without you ever hearing my voice.That is the power of written language. ✨

But human beings discovered a very strange book. A book around six hundred years old.

Its pages are filled with beautiful writing and curious pictures. There are strange plants 🌿, enormous roots, flowers and leaves. There are circles, stars and diagrams that seem to point toward the sky. ⭐🌙 There are little human figures bathing in pools, strange tubes, herbs, roots and jars. Some pages may even contain something like recipes or poems.

It looks as though this book has a lot to tell us. But...nobody can read it. 😮📖🔐

And I don't mean that the handwriting is messy. It isn't a case of somebody writing so badly that everyone says, “Oh dear, what does THAT say?” 😄 No. The writing itself is mysterious. The pages are covered with a collection of symbols that nobody has been able to decode.

When this mysterious book was made, there were no laptops. 💻❌ No internet. No Google. No Wikipedia. No printer. So if you wanted to write a book six hundred years ago, you had to make ink first, and perhaps some other pigments if you wished to decorate your drawings.

Because the book I'm talking about is written entirely by hand, page by page. Some pages almost look like a nature journal. 🌿 You find flowers, leaves, stems, and enormous twisting roots. The writing sits beside them in neat lines. Sometimes the little groups of symbols are so carefully arranged that you might even imagine they were tiny poems. But what do they say? Nobody knows. Let me show you a few pages. 👀📖 Look at the plants. 🌱🌿🌸 And look carefully at the writing.

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5

People who have been studying this book have been very puzzled about whether the drawn plants are medicinal plants, whether they have special properties, or whether they are even known specimens. But if you think that this is some kind of botanical journal of a person living 600 years ago, wait until you see the pages where you find circles, stars, suns, moon-like shapes, and diagrams that seem to have something to do with the sky.

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Some pages even fold out, as if the person making the book needed more space than an ordinary page could provide. And everywhere, the beautiful writing continues, line after line, page after page. Those mysterious words that nobody could understand. Line after line. Page after page. But what does it say?🔤❓🔤❓🔤

Many centuries passed, and the book travelled from one human being to another. Different people owned it. Different people wondered about it. Different people tried to crack its mysterious script .

Then, a little over one hundred years ago, in 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich acquired the book. The book was already centuries old when it came into his hands. Imagine owning a book that nobody could read. What would you do?

Voynich wanted people to solve the mystery. He showed the book to scholars and language specialists. Historians examined it. Codebreakers searched for hidden messages. People who studied patterns counted and compared the symbols. And when people discover very old handwriting, there are special experts who can help with decoding it. They are called palaeographers. 📜🔎 Let's clap that long word 👏PAL-AE-OG-RA-PHERS 👏 A palaeographer is a person who studies old handwriting and ancient written documents. And the word itself gives us a clue to its meaning. Palaeo- comes from a Greek word meaning old or ancient. ⏳ And -graphy comes from the Greek graphein, meaning to write. ✍️ So a palaeographer is someone who studies old writing But even the palaeographers couldn't help and tell what was written inside. 🤫📖🔐

Voynich helped make this mysterious book famous, but there was another problem. The book had no title that anyone could read. And no author that anyone could identify. So people began referring to it by the name of the man who had brought so much attention to it: the Voynich Manuscript. 📖🔐 Not because Voynich wrote it. He didn't. The mysterious book was already hundreds of years old when he acquired it. But his name became attached to its mystery.

In more recent times, computers have joined the investigation too. 💻🔍 They can count symbols, search for repeated patterns and compare parts of the writing much faster than a human being could. 🗝️✨ Do you know why I told you about this mysterious book? To make you wonder and find out more... You know that human beings do not like leaving mysteries alone.

So now I wonder... what can you find out about the Voynich Manuscript? Here I can share a digital file of the book with you if you want to investigate the script yourself, look for patterns, and search for symbols that repeat. But where is the real Voynich Manuscript kept today? Can you find the library, the university, and the country? What are its pages made from? Paper? Papyrus? Parchment? And what animal was used to make it?

The Voynich Manuscript is not the only old book with an extraordinary story. There are other mysterious writings still waiting for someone to decode them. 📖🔐🔍 Perhaps you would like to investigate some of these other mysterious writings:

• 📕 The Rohonc Codex

• 🌀 The Phaistos Disc

• 🏺 Linear A

• 🗿 Rongorongo

With Montessori joy,
Vanina 😊