#ANCIENT VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT TRANSLATION CODE#

We know so little, in fact, that the manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the rare-book dealer who stumbled upon it in 1912. The ornate letters don’t belong to any alphabet we know of, and its drawings don’t offer much insight either - diagrams and paintings of otherworldly herbs and flowers, zodiac charts, astronomical symbols, naked women bathing in green ponds. No one knows who wrote it, or even what its contents mean. Today, the 240 page-long manuscript is tucked away at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it’s been stored for the past 50 years. Until they found out about the Voynich Manuscript. He wrote the book that trained generations of NSA analysts. She became a detective of sorts, collaborating with both the US and British Intelligence to expose Nazi rings and spies. When Friedman was asked by Congress about the contributions of their cryptanalysts, an admiral hollered, “Hell, they won the war!” They’re considered by some the world’s greatest cryptologists.

#ANCIENT VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT TRANSLATION CODE#

During the next thirty years, and with little to no knowledge of mathematics, they would develop the field of cryptology, and unravel thousands of messages from two world wars - the most famous of them being a highly secret and complex code developed by the Japanese, dubbed Purple Code - untangled secrets from smugglers, gangsters and international armies. They started solving puzzles, breaking codes and revealing the secrets of others long before there were any computers to help them. With the help of Elizebeth, Friedman taught the first class of government men in codes and ciphers, and would go on to become the director of SIS, or Signal Intelligence Service, US’s codebreaking division throughout World War II. When the war broke out, the US government had no Intelligence division, and so Fabyan volunteered his laboratory and resources and set them at the disposal of the government. They met, fell in love, and moved on to bigger things. This theory was later disproved, but it hardly mattered to Elizebeth and William. They were both enlisted by Fabyan to develop cryptographic techniques that could support his belief that Francis Bacon was the real author behind Shakespeare’s plays. Friedman, a genetics postgraduate whose parents had fled from Moldavia to escape growing anti-semitism in 1890s’ Europe.

She was Elizebeth Smith, an English major from Pennsylvania with dark brown curls and enthusiasm for Latin, Greek, and German. They had met just the year before, during the First World War, in the Riverbank Laboratories, a private research lab run by the eccentric millionaire George Fabyan, just outside Chicago, Illinois.

Ancient voynich manuscript translation