It is covered with drawings of fantastic plants, strange symbols and naked women. Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century's best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years.'It was bought by Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia for 600 ducats, an absolute fortune for that period,' said Rugg, whose paper on the manuscript is published in the journal Cryptologia.

'People clearly thought it contained arcane secrets and great knowledge and were prepared to pay to learn them.' Unfortunately, after only a few years in Rudolph's care, the manuscript was lost and was not seen again until it surfaced in Frascati, Italy, in 1912 when it was bought by a Russian antiquarian called Wilfred Voynich.

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