Archaeology & History

New study: the Voynich manuscript might actually be a cipher

By T.K. Randall
January 3, 2026 ·  2 comments

Image: Voynich Manuscript
Credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University / (PD) Copyright Expired The enigmatic codex, first brought to wider attention when rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired it from a Jesuit college near Rome in 1912, contains around 240 pages of strange, indecipherable characters and images.

Written on fine calfskin parchment that has been radiocarbon-dated to the early 15th Century, the book's strange language and accompanying illustrations have long remained a mystery.

Now, though, the invention of a new cipher - known as Naibbe - has highlighted intriguing parallels with the manuscript, thus offering up the possibility that it, too, could in fact be a type of cipher.

Naibbe, which uses dice and playing cards to transform Latin or Italian text into glyphs, produces output that statistically and visually resembles aspects of the Voynich script.

"My hope is that this becomes adopted as a computational benchmark," said science journalist Michael Greshko, who developed the new cipher."The points of difference between the cipher and the manuscript may point the way to how the text was actually created."

So far, nobody has conclusively deciphered what the Voynich Manuscript says.

If the text really is a cipher, Greshko's work could play a crucial role in understanding how such an encoding might have been achieved.

Could we finally be on the verge of learning what is written on its pages ?

Only time will tell.

Source: Live Science | Comments (2)

Tags: Voynich Manuscript