A 500-year-old manuscript with unknown writing and surprising drawings that has just been deciphered. The Voynich manuscript is a mystery.

The article is available on the HuffPost website.

The Voynich manuscript was one of the most undecipherable texts in the world, but a linguistics expert claims to have finally succeeded in decrypting it.

This text is written in an unknown script, the first mention of which dates back to 1912, when an antiquarian named Wilfrid Voynich acquired it.

Since then, many specialists had tried to decode it, without success. Very little information was therefore available about it. In 2011, carbon-14 dating determined that the paper was made between 1404 and 1438, but the content of the text and its author have never been identified.

At least until recently, since on April 29, Dr. Gerard Cheshire published a study in which he explains that he has succeeded in deciphering this particularly mysterious manuscript.

A commonly used language

He first discovered that the writing used would actually be derived from a popular form of Latin. And it was by studying both the writing system and this language that he managed to decode the text.

This allowed him to understand the content of the text, its author, and the reason why it was written.

According to the specialist, the manuscript contains information about medicinal herbs, therapeutic baths, and astrology. It was compiled by a Dominican sister for Marie of Castile, Queen of Aragon (in Spain, editor's note) from April 2, 1416, to June 27, 1458.

This information is significant, as it proves that the manuscript was written in a commonly used language at the time and not in an obscure language.

Now that the writing system has been deciphered, Gerard Cheshire explains that there is only the complete translation of the text left to know its full substance. According to the specialist, this next step will still take some time, as the manuscript consists of 200 pages.

Some researchers question Gerard Cheshire's analysis, such as Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, who explains that the language discovered by the doctor simply does not exist.

We will still have to wait for the work proposed by Gerard Cheshire to be studied more thoroughly for the mystery of the Voynich manuscript to be completely unraveled.