#The voynich manuscript solved crack#
To understand exactly how challenging it is to crack a mystery language, we can look at one that still remains a riddle: the Voynich manuscript. Would historians have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs without the Rosetta Stone? While there have been huge advances in linguists’ code-breaking abilities, it’s possible that it would still remain a mystery without some translation help. Using knowledge of the Greek, Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion was able to translate the texts for the first time. The Rosetta Stone also advertised the fact that it was the same text written three times in various languages. While the Egyptian languages had been dead for two millennia, written Greek was a language that scholars could read.
Its importance hinged on the fact that it was written in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic (the less formal writing system in ancient Egypt) and, most importantly, Greek. In the late 18th century, as France’s Napoleon Bonaparte was having his soldiers raid Egypt for antiquities, someone stumbled upon a large black basalt slab. Ancient Egyptian culture was nearly lost. The Egyptians wrote with a writing system that, up to the 18th century, no one could figure out. Archaeologists investigated the pyramids and cities, but there was a huge gap in understanding: the hieroglyphs. For many centuries, ancient Egypt was a mystery to historians.
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