The problem with that theory is that alchemy books of the time all use a common set of motifs for their pictures these motifs cannot be found in the manuscript.Īnother idea is that the book is about astrology practices common at the time, such as bloodletting were often connected with astrology. This would also make sense, if the text was about making certain kinds of medicine. The leaves and fruit of the Castor oil plant have been identified, as well.īecause of the tubes in the biological section, the text may be related to alchemy. Many of the plant pictures are composite: they combine parts of plants the root of one plant is added to the leaves of another the flowers may be from a third species. Two plants can be guessed, with some certainty: the Wild pansy and the Maidenhair fern. An identification of the plants, based on the images has mostly failed, though. A herbal is a collection of plants, with their description. The first section is almost certainly a herbal.
#VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT ILLUSTRATIONS MANUAL#
The purpose of the book was probably to serve as a manual to make drugs, or as a book about medicine. The entropy of words is similar to that of Latin or English.A statistical analysis has been done, and the "words" resemble "natural language": There are about 35,000 "words", made of glyphs or characters. The text can probably be represented with an alphabet of between twenty and thirty characters. It is difficult (and a question of debate) to determine the alphabet used in the text some glyphs may be variations of others, and some may simply be two glyphs joined. Given the space between these, there seem to be "words" and "paragraphs". The flow of the text is smooth, which gives the impression that the symbols were not enciphered. There probably was another "source" they copied from. The person or people writing the text seem to have been fluent in the language. The text is written from left to right, because there are irregular margins on the right. There is strong evidence that many of the book's folios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what we see today. The figures were colored with paint, possibly at a later date. The gaps were already there when Voynich bought the manuscript in 1912.Ī quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines. As there are gaps in the numbering, it seems likely that some pages were lost the manuscript probably had at least 272 pages. Depending on the way of counting, this gives a total of 240 pages. Some of the fold-outs have unusual shapes.
The quires are numbered from 1 to 20, the folios from 1 to 116. The quires consist of folios, with text or illustrations on both sides of the folio.
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