This resulted for the most part in a usable correspondence between the VM and English alphabets which when once established was used for deciphering all subsequent anagrams. I therefore used these single words to help modify the EVA alphabet (shown below) based on the plant/root name obtained from the subsequent translated Italian anagram. Most of these drawings are so poor that the author of the manuscript obviously considered it necessary to identify the roots/plants with names. Word anagrams do not always offer a unique solution and an exact collelation between the EVA characters and the English alphabet has not been established, therefore, to test this ‘anagram hypothesis’ as precisely as possible, I used the single words found on many of the herbal pages. I was further encouraged when looking at the last page, Folio 116v of the VM to find that the top line on this page is: Has suggested that the VM is nothing but a meaningless jumble of letters! I wondered whether he was not correct, with one modification, only the individual words were jumbled, i.e.
The encoding must have been simple, easy and direct. To produce a 200 page manuscript under these conditions would be a very tedious task.
VOYAGE MANUSCRIPT CODE
A complicated code would require making a preliminary copy using for example a slate for a scratch pad. When I examined the VM script, I noticed that there were very few corrections, and the writing, though slow, had the appearance of easy fluidity. I am however addicted of solving Jumbles and playing Text Twist and this made me consider a different approach. As the best code breakers, using powerful computers, were unable to decipher the code, it did not appear likely that I could break the code. Later in my studies I had to modify some of the EVA correlations. I initially used Rene Zandbergen’s basic EVA characters (i)Īs a starting point to correlate the VM letters with the English alphabet, while taking into account that the Italian alphabet only uses 21 letters. medieval Italian, so I have assumed the VM language to be Italian. If Leonardo da Vinci was the author of the VM, he would have used the language of Dante, i.e.