The Voynich manuscript has long been shorthand for the unsolved and the unknowable, a late medieval codex filled with looping glyphs that refuse to yield a single clear sentence. A new cryptologic study now argues that the book’s strange script may not be meaningless after all, but the product of a carefully designed cipher that imitates natural language while hiding its message. If that claim holds, the most famous “unreadable” book on Earth might finally move from pure mystery into the realm of codebreaking.
Instead of treating the manuscript as an alien language or elaborate hoax, the new work tests whether a specific kind of substitution system could generate text that looks and behaves like the Voynich pages. By reconstructing how such a cipher might have been used with dice and playing cards, the research reframes the debate: the question is no longer whether there is a code, but what kind of mind would build such a system and why.
Why the Voynich manuscript still matters
More than a century after it surfaced in the hands of book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, the manuscript that now bears his name remains one of the most studied objects in historical cryptology. The codex, cataloged as MS 408 in the collections of the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is a compact, richly illustrated volume whose text is written in an unknown script that has resisted every conventional decipherment attempt. Its pages are filled with botanical drawings, circular diagrams and nude figures in baths, all rendered with the same steady hand that penned the looping glyphs, which gives the impression of a coherent project rather than a random collage.
Scholars who have examined the physical object describe a carefully made book, with vellum leaves, colored inks and a consistent layout that suggest a serious investment of time and resources rather than a casual prank. The Beinecke Library notes that the codex, now known simply as the Voynich manuscript, has become a magnet for linguists, cryptographers and historians who see in its undeciphered text a rare chance to test their methods against a real historical puzzle. That enduring attention is what makes any new claim about its structure, including the latest cipher hypothesis, more than an academic curiosity.
A brief, tangled history of an infamous codex
The manuscript’s known history is as enigmatic as its script, but a few hard facts stand out. At some point in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, the codex belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled from Prague and was famous for collecting rare books, alchemical treatises and works of natural philosophy. According to the Yale University Beinecke records, he purchased the volume for 600 g gold ducats, a substantial sum that signals he believed it contained valuable knowledge or at least a prestigious secret. That transaction alone undercuts the idea that the book was always seen as a mere curiosity.
After Rudolph’s death, the manuscript passed through the hands of various scholars and collectors before disappearing from view for centuries, only to reemerge in the early twentieth century when Wilfrid Voynich acquired it and began promoting it as an undeciphered treasure. The Beinecke account traces its later journey into institutional care, where it is now preserved as MS 408 and made available in high resolution to researchers worldwide. A separate note in the same institutional history records that the codex eventually came into the orbit of Ethel Voynich, Wilfrid Voynich’s widow, underscoring how closely the family’s name and fortunes became tied to this single mysterious book.
What the new study actually claims
The latest wave of attention comes from a study by science journalist Michael Greshko, who set out to test whether a particular kind of cipher could plausibly generate text with the same statistical quirks as the Voynich script. Rather than proposing a full translation, Greshko’s work, published in the journal Cryptologia, focuses on structure: if one assumes the manuscript encodes an underlying message, what sort of system could produce its repeating patterns, word lengths and positional regularities. His analysis suggests that a cleverly designed substitution method, applied consistently, can reproduce many of those features without requiring a wholly invented language.
In practical terms, that means the manuscript might be less an alien tongue and more a sophisticated encryption of an ordinary European language, disguised through a custom alphabet and rule set. Greshko’s study, summarized in a detailed report on how the Voynich manuscript could be a cipher, emphasizes that the goal is not to claim victory over the code but to show that a plausible medieval mechanism exists. That shift from “no one could have written this” to “someone with the right tools could have written this” is a significant reframing of the debate.
The Naibbe cipher and the role of dice and cards
At the heart of the new discussion is a proposed system known as The Naibbe cipher, which uses dice and playing cards to generate the glyphs that appear on the Voynich pages. In this reconstruction, a scribe would roll dice or draw cards to select from tables of symbols and transformation rules, producing text that looks organic but is in fact the output of a controlled randomization process. The idea is not that the manuscript is pure chance, but that chance operations are harnessed to obscure the underlying plaintext while still preserving enough structure for the author to write coherent content.
Reports on the Naibbe approach describe how this method can replicate the distinctive clusters and repeated sequences that have long puzzled analysts, while still being feasible for a medieval or early modern practitioner familiar with gaming tools. One account notes that The Naibbe cipher uses dice and cards to replicate Voynich manuscript glyphs, providing a feasible medieval method that could have been used by an author who wanted to hide sensitive material. If that reconstruction is accurate, it would explain why the text behaves statistically like language while remaining opaque to direct substitution attacks.
A substitution cipher tailored to MS 408
Parallel to the Naibbe work, cryptology discussions have focused on whether the manuscript can be modeled as a substitution cipher that maps an underlying alphabet onto the Voynich glyph set. One detailed analysis, framed explicitly as a “Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript,” examines the hypothesis that MS 408 from the Yale University Beinecke collection encodes a plaintext through a layered system of symbol replacement and positional rules. The author’s Abstract states that the article investigates how such a cipher might operate across the entire manuscript at once, rather than treating each section as a separate puzzle.
That study, which treats the Voynich Manuscript as a candidate for a global substitution system, argues that the apparent complexity of the script may come from a relatively simple core cipher augmented by stylistic flourishes. By focusing on recurring glyph groups and their positions within lines and paragraphs, the analysis suggests that the text could be encoding a natural language with a constrained vocabulary, perhaps related to the herbal and astronomical themes of the illustrations. While it stops short of naming a specific language, the work strengthens the case that the manuscript’s structure is compatible with encryption rather than pure invention.
How a new cipher model changes the stakes
If the Naibbe system or a related substitution scheme truly underlies the Voynich text, the implications are significant for both historians and codebreakers. For decades, one of the main arguments against a straightforward cipher explanation has been the manuscript’s unusual statistical profile, which does not match simple monoalphabetic substitution of Latin or any other known European language. A model that uses dice, cards and layered symbol rules to generate text with those exact quirks shows that a determined author could have engineered the script to evade the standard tools of cryptanalysis while still encoding meaningful content. Coverage of the new work emphasizes that such a cipher would not only be technically possible but also culturally plausible in a milieu where gaming tools and secret writing coexisted. One synthesis of the research notes that Home Archaeological News New Study Suggests the Voynich Manuscript May Have Been Created Using a Cipher, highlighting how the proposed method could have allowed an author to produce long stretches of encrypted text without constant reference to a bulky codebook. That practicality matters, because any convincing explanation must account for how a real person could have written hundreds of pages in a consistent script.
Could the manuscript finally be deciphered?
For readers outside the cryptology world, the natural question is whether this new cipher framework brings us closer to actually reading the Voynich text. Some researchers argue that if the structural model is correct, it opens the door to systematic attacks that were not previously possible, since analysts can now simulate how different plaintexts would behave when passed through the proposed system. A recent overview of the research notes that if the cipher hypothesis is true, it means the bizarre book could potentially be deciphered, turning what has long been a statistical curiosity into a solvable codebreaking challenge.
That same overview describes how The Voynich Manuscript can be modeled using a new cipher that offers fascinating clues to how the book was made, from the order in which pages were written to the way certain glyphs cluster around illustrations. If those production clues can be tied to specific historical contexts or authorial habits, they may help narrow down candidate languages and subject matter, which in turn would guide future decryption attempts. For now, the promise is more methodological than lexical, but it is a tangible step beyond decades of stalled speculation.
AI, pattern hunting and the risk of false solutions
As human cryptanalysts refine their models, artificial intelligence systems have also been turned loose on the Voynich text, with mixed and often controversial results. One widely shared video claims that the Voynich Manuscript was finally decoded by an AI, presenting a flowing English narrative that reads more like modern apocalyptic poetry than a medieval herbal or astronomical treatise. The narration includes lines such as “not from the fluency of a machine the past has delivered a warning. and it is the responsibility of the present to pay,” which sound evocative but raise immediate questions about how closely they are grounded in the underlying glyph sequences.
That example, showcased in a clip titled Voynich Manuscript Finally Decoded By An AI… And It’s Not, illustrates both the power and the danger of pattern-hungry models applied to ambiguous data. Without a firm structural cipher model, AI systems are prone to hallucinate meaning that fits modern expectations rather than historical realities, producing outputs that feel satisfying but lack verifiable alignment with the original text. The emerging cipher research offers a way to discipline those tools, by constraining them to operate within a defined encryption framework instead of free-associating across the glyph stream.
Why collectors and emperors might have wanted a ciphered book
Any convincing cipher theory also has to answer a basic historical question: why would someone go to such lengths to hide the contents of a book that looks, at first glance, like a herbal and astrological compendium. The fact that Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, was willing to pay 600 g gold ducats for the codex suggests that he believed it contained knowledge worth protecting or at least information that conferred prestige through its secrecy. In a court culture fascinated by alchemy, astrology and esoteric philosophy, a book written in an unbroken cipher would have been a potent symbol of hidden wisdom.
The Beinecke Library’s detailed note on the codex’s provenance, which records that Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor, purchased it for 600 g gold ducats, reinforces the idea that the manuscript was not treated as a trivial curiosity. If the new cipher models are correct, the book may have functioned as a secure repository for medical recipes, astrological prognostications or even heterodox religious ideas that could have been dangerous to circulate in plain Latin. That context would make the use of a complex, custom-designed cipher not only plausible but strategically sensible.
From medieval codebooks to modern data graphs
There is a striking continuity between the way the Voynich manuscript may have been constructed and how modern systems organize and obscure information. The proposed Naibbe cipher, with its tables of glyphs and rules accessed through dice and cards, resembles a physical version of a lookup table or algorithmic process, where inputs are transformed into outputs according to a fixed but hidden logic. In the digital world, similar principles govern how search engines, recommendation systems and shopping platforms map raw data into structured insights that are legible to machines but opaque to casual users.
One contemporary example is the Shopping Graph, a vast index of products and relationships that powers modern e-commerce discovery. According to a technical overview, Product information is aggregated from brands, stores and other content providers into a single graph that can be queried and recombined in countless ways, much like a codebook that turns scattered entries into a coherent system. The comparison is not perfect, but it highlights a shared impulse across centuries: to build intricate intermediaries between raw information and human readers, whether to protect secrets, enhance discovery or both.
Why the cipher hypothesis will not end the debate
Even as the new research strengthens the case that the Voynich manuscript is built on a deliberate cipher, it is unlikely to settle the argument over what the book actually says. Some scholars remain open to alternative explanations, including the possibility that the text encodes a constructed language or that it was produced by a small, possibly heretical community with its own symbolic system. Reports on the Naibbe model acknowledge that while the cipher is a strong candidate, other scenarios, such as a text created by a heretical sect, remain possible given the manuscript’s unusual imagery and lack of clear parallels.
One synthesis of the current debate notes that Jan reports on how a unique cipher that uses playing cards and dice could explain how the manuscript may have come together, while still leaving room for alternative readings of its purpose and audience. Until a proposed decryption can be tested against large portions of the text and shown to produce consistent, historically plausible content, the Voynich manuscript will continue to occupy its liminal space between code and myth. The new cipher studies do not close that chapter, but they do offer the most concrete roadmap yet for turning an enduring enigma into a solvable problem.
Supporting sources: New Study Suggests the Voynich Manuscript May Have Been ….
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