World's ‘most mysterious manuscript’ could be ancient encrypted message, study finds

Experts have long struggled to explain to understand its content, with some concluding it as gibberish.

But a new study has suggested the historic manuscript is a form of ciphertext.

Researcher Michael A Greshko put the theory to the test by producing a new form of writing, which he named the Naibbe cipher.

He designed the cipher in a way that could be achieved entirely by hand and used materials available in the 15th century.

He found that when the cipher was used to encrypt Latin and Italian texts, the results could still be read and showed similar patterns to the Voynich manuscript.

"The resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once," he wrote in the journal Cryptologia.

The Naibbe cipher works by replacing each letter in Latin or Italian with different groups of Voynich-style symbols.

The cipher is designed so the text can still be decoded, while also reproducing as many of the Voynich Manuscript’s features as possible, Mr Greshko explains.

The study found that the length of words and symbols generated by the Naibbe cipher match similar patterns as seen in the manuscript.

This therefore supported the hypothesis that it is a form of encrypted text.

The researcher wrote in his conclusion: "I do not assert that the Naibbe cipher precisely reflects how the VMS (Voynich manuscript) was created, nor do I assert that the VMS even is a ciphertext.

"Rather, the Naibbe cipher’s structure may present a promising path to reconciling the evidence for the ciphertext, language, and gibberish hypotheses."

"I hope that the Naibbe cipher inspires new computational analyses of both VMS-mimic ciphers and the VMS itself—and that someday soon, the low hum of the VMS’s six-century mystery and the cacophony of a century’s worth of analysis will give way to melodious harmony," he added.

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