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Voynich Manuscript

from <Qocheedy Daiin> by The Far Stairs

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The Voynich manuscript is a work which dates to the early 15th Century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912.

Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script and language remain unknown and unreadable.

There is no obvious punctuation, and no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing written in rather distorted Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th Centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.

Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent “letter” is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Roger Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before van Leeuwenhoek.

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from <Qocheedy Daiin>, released February 9, 1944

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