КРИПТОГРАФИЧЕСКОЕ ЗНАЧЕНИЕ МАНУСКРИПТА ВОЙНИЧА

Abstract

The article analyzes modern approaches to deciphering the text of the Voynich manuscript. The work contains a brief overview in the history of the manuscript discovery and an analysis of the main versions about the authorship and the first owners of the manuscript, the place and time of its creation and its content. The author pays attention to the study of key approaches to the definition of cryptographic methods that could be used by the author or authors of the essay and the analysis of the manuscript text decrypting issues facing modern researchers. The article provides a review of other encrypted manuscripts, the time and place of creation of which allow comparison with the Voynich manuscript according to a number of selected criteria. Particular attention is paid to analyzing the challenges of defining the manuscript language, what involves the choice of one or more natural languages within one or the other language group, an artificial language or “language” consisting of a random set of characters. Difficulties with transliteration of manuscript symbols used to create machine-readable versions of the text are considered. An analysis of the prospects for studying the cryptographic content of the manuscript is carried out. Attention is paid to the content of a number of reports of the international conference on the study of the Voynich manuscript, held by the University of Malta in November–December 2022. The author emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Voynich manuscript, which requires the combined efforts of cryptologists, mathematicians, historians, philologists, linguists to successfully unravel the content of the manuscript Voynich.