#The voynich manuscript cover full

'Though I'm not yet 100 percent convinced by the precision of the dating, it's probably reasonably close ' Nick Pelling, the author of 'the Curse of the Voynich,' told Discovery News. Several experts also proposed that it was a deliberate hoax, possibly forged by John Dee, an English mathematician and astrologer at Rudolph's court. Other speculations ranged from the manuscript being the secret work of a religious sect, the only remaining document from a forgotten language, an unbreakable secret code, and the recipe for the 'elixir of life.' Voynich, which claimed the book had belonged to the 16th-century Habsburg emperor Rudolf II, believed it was authored by Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English friar and scientist - a theory which carbon dating has put to rest. The dating might help in ruling out some hypotheses.Įver since Wilfrid Voynich made the manuscript public in the hope of having it translated, theories flourished about the book's author and content. The book was clearly a lot of work and must have taken several years to complete,' Hodgins said.

One can not say how much time elapsed between the death of the animal and when the writer put pen to page. 'It is important to realize that we date when the animal lived, not when the book was made. And in those periods, radiocarbon dating is much less precise,' Hodgins said.Īccording to the researchers, the dating is reliable, since it was repeated four times with independent leaves of parchment. Sometimes atmospheric radiocarbon levels remain constant for many decades, even centuries.

During the early 15th century, radiocarbon levels were changing quite rapidly, so that allowed us to narrow the time frame. Hodgins' team was able to determine that the samples were made between 14 - quite a narrow range for a radiocarbon measurement. 'The four pages were explicitly selected from different sections to try to determine if the book was written over many decades,' Hodgins told Discovery News. In order to carbon-14 date the book, which is currently kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University and accessible online, Hodgins used four one-sixteenth of an inch by one inch samples from four different pages. Working at the NSF-Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Hodgins was able to solve one of the many mysteries about the book, nailing down the time when the manuscript's pages were made. Taking its name from the rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered it in 1912 in the Villa Mondragone near Rome, the manuscript, which is about 250 pages long, makes 'The Da Vinci Code' pale by comparison. The dating process announced February 11, 2011, makes the book a century older than scholars had previously thought and quashes some theories about its origin. None of the plants are clearly identifiable, and many seem to be odd compilations of different root and leaf systems.Īrticle from Discovery News - February 11, 2011

#The voynich manuscript cover full

It is also full of drawings of objects resembling plants, ancient lab equipment and cosmological signs - there are even illustrations of women in baths. The mystery book, called the Voynich manuscript, is written in a language that no one can read and hasn't been found anywhere else. Researchers at the University of Arizona have finally dated the book to the early 15th century. One of the most mysterious books in the world has given up one of its secrets: its age. Dating the Manuscript Mystery Book Gives Up a Secret Live Science - February 14, 2011