FASCINATING! The book—called the Voynich manuscript after the rare-book dealer who stumbled upon it a century ago—is written in an unknown script, with an alphabet that appears nowhere other than in its pages. The writing system is oddly beautiful, full of looping and fluid curves. A series of distinctive letters, called “gallows” for their resemblance to a hangman’s scaffold, are sometimes conjoined with other letters, or have been embellished with elaborate curlicues by a scribe. What these glyphs signify—whether they represent phonetic information or numeric values or something else—is anyone’s guess. Judging by its illustrations, the manuscript seems to be a compendium of knowledge related to the natural world, including a section about herbs, a section apparently detailing biological processes, various zodiac charts, and pages devoted to the movements of celestial bodies, such as the transit of the moon across the Pleiades. The writing flows smoothly hesitation from one letter to the next; based on the handwriting, it’s thought to be the work of at least two and as many as eight practiced scribes, and possibly required years of labor.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 19:14:59 +0000
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