No, the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Is Not Written in Hebrew

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If you’re like me, you would have replied two weeks ago to the question “What do you think of the Voynich manuscript?” with the answer “The Voy which manuscript?” I had never heard either of the Polish rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930) or of the mysterious manuscript purchased by him in 1912 from the library of the Collegio Romano in Rome; much less did I know that the undeciphered code it is written in has been a famous puzzle of modern cryptography and that Bradley Hauer and Grzegorz Kondrak, two computer scientists from the University of Alberta, announced in a 2016 paper that its encoded language is Hebrew. All of this I’ve learned from the media, which recently came across Hauer and Kondrak’s paper, published in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and turned it into a news item.

The parchment of the 240-page manuscript acquired by Voynich, so I’ve also learned, has been dated by radiocarbon testing to sometime between 1404 and 1438. The manuscript’s text, which reads from left to right, is in an unfamiliar alphabet and accompanied by numerous illustrations—some of different plants and herbal preparations, some of astronomical charts, and some, most intriguingly, of nude or semi-nude female figures bathing in pools or tubs and linked to each other by pipe-like conduits.