The Voynich Manuscript: The World's Most Mysterious Book

ah hello everybody welcome back to another brand new episode of decoding the unknown this is like the this morning by internet of my office hasn't been working the entire morning because as i've brought up before on this channel and others vodafone are the worst company in the world and i made a video about nestle and enron and all of this vodafone guys vodafone and they phoned them up and they're like enter your customer number i'm like what the [ __ ] is my customer number so i'm just left recording stuff which is fine i don't mind it but i'd also like if my internet works because i could do all the other [ __ ] that i need to do in my life jesus christ also there's no no way for me to look up pronunciations because uh not that i really do anyway but now i've definitely got an excuse because the internet just doesn't work sorry i know this is like a rant that is just like completely pointless at the beginning of an episode but holy [ __ ] does it piss me off it's been three hours it's been three hours vodafone i i'm possibly longer because i got into the office three hours ago and it's just it's not been working and you just can't reach them you just can't you just can't contact them they don't like that and then you look it up on their online outage thing it's just like your address isn't valid and it's like i live in a big street in a major city how is my address not valid good lord sorry we're here to do an episode this is the code in the unknown i'm sorry welcome my name's simon i host this show uh it's all about um god i'm so filled with rage i'm struggling it's all about mysterious things and we try to uh poke holes in the mystery and try to figure out what's actually going on and that's what we're going to be doing with the voynich manuscript today the world's most mysterious book thank you kevin who wrote this script i've never read this before so we're going to go through it together i'm going to read it you're going to listen to me reading it you're also going to listen to my various thoughts on it i'm familiar with the voyage manuscript of course it's that one with all those weird plants in it and it's written in a language that no one seems to understand much like the the language that the people at vodafone tech support speak which isn't a language because you can't speak to them [Music] i've always loved the show the twilight zone aside from being generally creepy the episodes frequently had clever and dark twists as well perhaps it was the frequency of unhappy endings that appealed to me i was only a child when i first started watching the twilight zone so seeing something with an unhappy ending was extremely novel and an original thing to me though as an adult i now recognize that it's no different from a goddamn day on this forsaken planet holy [ __ ] kevin getting dark red getting dark even me though i'm like god forsaken internet people i you gotta be careful what you say on the internet because i was just gonna make a joke about like well you know terrorism which i'm obviously not going to do because i'm not a terrorist but it's like holy you get cancelled for that you go to prison i'm not going to do anything to vodafone i'm just going to quietly stew in my rage oh maybe i just got hooked on the show because i loved star trek simon and i same page ah star trek and the twilight on an episode starring william shatner and leonard nimoy i never got into the twilight zone i know the it was a little bit before my time i know kevin's about my age a little bit older than me i think if i remember correctly sorry kevin and i don't know i was in black and white right and all this stuff i loved a show called the outer limits which as i understand it had very twilight uh twilight zone vibes and i also love the same things they're like there'd be endings and it's like oh my god wait the aliens took over the world and everyone dies oh no and yeah i loved that show i tried re-watching it recently i think i've told this story before and uh it just felt very very dated i was like saying to my wife we've got to watch the outer limits this is a great show from back in the 90s we tried the same thing with sliders and she's like fact boy this is rubbish what are you talking about and i'm like it's not rubbish it's just dated it's just dated it was really good back in the day believe me sliders as much as i enjoyed the show however there was one episode that always bothered me even as a kid the twist was cute and it made sense but the reveal is so far outside the realm of possibility that i could never get over it the episode is also one of the most famous and highly rated episodes in twilight zone history if you haven't figured it out by the subject of today's episode i'm of course talking about to serve man i don't even know how this relates was the voynich manuscript somewhere in the twilight zone episode to serve man i feel like i should go and watch this before recording this episode but i obviously can't because my internet's not working did i mention that wi-fi is down no no no no no no no no no for anyone unfamiliar a race of aliens called canomits comes to earth to solve all of our problems brilliant welcome gamma bits come come what can you do about this baldness that i'm suffering from there like fat boy we've got other things to worry about it's like that that worry about those later this is an easy fix isn't it cabinets come on people are highly skeptical but after the aliens provide cheap renewable energy and eliminate all hunger and war humanity decides that these candidates might be all right after all i get the feeling that's not going to end well is it they're going to like children of menace or something however after the first meeting with the un one of the canomits leaves behind a book i'm not going to complain that it makes no sense for him to have brought this book to the u.n in the first place or that it was clearly left behind intentionally because well the plot needs to happen what bothered me is what happened next military cryptographers immediately got to work trying to decode the book they're able to quickly decipher the title as to serve man but they're stumped on the rest of the book apologies for the spoilers to the 60 year old piece of television but eventually one of the cryptographers deciphers the rest of the book and she reveals that it's a cookbook oh no the aliens want to eat us oh no to serve man means to serve us as a dish oh 60 year old tv is spoiled now the alien's true motivation makes sense as a twist additionally if advanced extraterrestrials really were to come and visit earth solving all of humanity's problems in exchange for occasionally harvesting some of us as food is probably the best case scenario power plays our unreality i feel like simon is going to pause there to try and think of a better realistic alternative and hopefully fail but if he proposes something more optimistic please don't be fooled dear listener i think we can agree the world said enough of british men trying to trick the rest of us and i think colonialism isn't all that bad i'm glad i didn't now kevin jesus anyway back to my petty complaining about classic television you and me both kevin you complained about classic tv and i'll complain about the whole vodafone even as a kid to serve man bother me because how the [ __ ] exactly would cryptographers actually translate it it wasn't english to put through some complex coding algorithm as an entirely alien language study on oh no wait they didn't manage to decode the hierarchy list did they there to find the rosetta stone and then they were like now we know so no it wouldn't work kevin's right kevin's always right why do i question kevin just i should just just just accept what kevin says as the gospel truth because all we know the gospel is completely true it wasn't in english to put through some complex coding albums in entirely alien language even if and this is a big if they were somehow able to correlate the hieroglyphs with roman characters to make it pronounceable to us well then what there's no frame of reference it would be a bunch of random sounds that bore no meaning to anyone on earth we would have no idea what these words meant what the sentence structure was or even what direction we were supposed to be reading it that's why the rosetta stone was such an important discovery there we go before its discovery no one could read ancient egyptian hieroglyphs and it was certainly not for lack of trying for nearly 2 000 years braggarts would gaze upon the ancient egyptian markings and think i can translate that only to waste their entire lives on a fool's errand luckily arrogance was abolished by the 1500s oh good i didn't realize so this definitely is not a story about people futilely spending the last 400 years trying to decode the mystical secrets held within the voynich manuscript the most mysterious book in the world the book before we get into the history of all of this let me explain what the voynich manuscript actually is this manuscript is a 225 page illustrated book that is generally broken up into six sections according to a rather patronizing description on wikipedia quote the text consists of over 170 000 characters with spaces dividing the text into about 35 000 groups of varying length usually referred to as words thanks ricomedia good job it's like i could look at laura mips and be like no lauren's a word and i i'm not the brightest man but i know that lorem and ipsam those are two words i don't know what they mean but they are words thanks wikipedia i feel smarter already the six sections of the book are not an explicit delineation from the manuscript itself but rather a way that they've been categorized as a result of their art the first and largest section is the herbal section making up about half of the codex each page consists of a picture of a plant or on rare occasions two pictures with complete paragraphs and text presumably about the plant while some of the pictures of the plants look realistic and likely identifiable as actual plants many are more foreign and abstract in nature for simon and our youtubers is an example of one of the pages of the herbal section it's on the next page oh kevin i'm just reading on my ipad so it's just it's just right here for uh people listening at home honestly it looks like a plant that's drawn by a seven-year-old and then there's some text next to it that looks like squiggly words sort of like a mix between maybe arabic and um regular english alphabet stuff roman alphabet is that what it's called abcd you know the one we're all familiar with if you're watching this video you're probably familiar with it right abcd you know what i'm talking about let's carry on you can see that a lot of detail is because of the root structure of the plants not just the stalk leaves and blossoms yeah but just like a weird like spirally root that could have been drawn by a child a child could draw this they can't even color in between the lines properly you'll also notice that the page appears to be numbered at the top right because this is an all fancy old-timey book it's written on parchment made from animal skin rather than paper these pages are called folios fascinating more specifically each page is a bifolio that is then folded in half which is generally how books are put together anyway however in this case there is only a single page numbering for each by folio so the numbers go from 1 to 116 but despite it being an over 200 page book more importantly from the numbering we know that 14 folios are missing and now that there's an image involved you could see the text itself of course you can't if you're listening to this can you but i already described it so you know what it looks like you're so welcome audio listeners maybe you could go just if you're probably a listener on your phone right maybe you're in the car so don't do this but just google image search the voynic manuscript spelt hold on v-o-y-n-i-c-h although honestly google's so so amazing you just type in it'll be like you could type it in like v-a-u-g-h-n i y c h and i'll be like oh yeah you mean voynich manuscript holy [ __ ] google you're so big brain it probably looks a little bit familiar right i'm certainly not saying it's immediately identifiable but it almost looks like a romanized version of arabic characters oh my god kevin you and i same page god we're such big brains it's the sort of thing that an expert might look at and say i can translate that indeed many have usually believing it will be a trivial task despite the swath's failed attempts that preceded their own despite the text looking like it should be approachable it clearly is not the next sections of the manuscript are the astronomical and cosmological sections these are the most identifiable because while many of the plants aren't drawn to look realistic for reasons that we'll address later the astrological pictures contain a lot of familiar elements zodiac signs and other constellations are present but the locations aren't completely accurate and some of the star maps look completely foreign probably because they're drawn by a child who's not very good at drawing star maps this is as good as time as any to address this so let me get this out of the way it's not [ __ ] aliens obviously aliens was going to be a theory and the astronomical section is used as evidence why are there foreign unknown stars and why do the constellations not line up properly from our point of view well something that these maps were based on the viewpoint of an entity located somewhere other than earth the much more likely scenario is that the author was just a shitty artist or didn't really care very much it'd be like if you like someone's like draw the big dipper simon and i'll be like bum bum bum bum i'm drawing like a the big dipper with my hands and it's like people are like oh my god it looks like the big dipper but it's not quite right he must be drawing it from another world because i know he just drew it free hands he's just a bit [ __ ] he looked up at the stars and i was like okay it looks about right it looks like a saucepan doesn't it boom if everyone already knows what virgo orion looks like it's probably fine just to be close enough plus with the book clearly written in some sort of secret code or language all that really matters is that the author knew what it was supposed to be and the author whoever they may be originated on earth the third section is the bowel neological section if you've never heard that word before don't worry apparently neither has ms word spell checker balineology is the study of therapeutic bathing and medicinal springs i mean you could have a bath and it could be therapeutic but it's not going to cure you of any diseases neither is a medicinal spring writing could be a very time consuming process especially writing hundreds of pages by hand so my personal theory is that by this point in the manuscript the author got really horny and wanted an excuse to draw a bunch of naked chicks and yes there are centerfolds sort of they're not sexy but there are multiple folios that fold out to reveal a larger image in addition to clearly being about bathing in some regard the layout of the bars themselves seems to be anatomical in nature as well for example is a picture of a bath that looks suspiciously like a pair of ovaries connected to the fetus by fallopian tubes this is weird it is exactly what's being described except it's kind of like there's lots of babies in this weird green pond and then these weird tubes with like cylinders outlining them and then they go off to some sort of weird beehive looking it's very strange but i could draw oh maybe i couldn't draw a baby that good are these babies or are these well they have breasts so i'm assuming these are actually women but they're all bathing in some sort of weird womb this shit's pretty weird dude to be honest or probably men out there who don't want to be concerned with pointless things like how female sexual anatomy actually works here's a piece here's a picture of what you get of a seahorse [ __ ] a dragon although the dragon is actually from the herbal section is oh what does okay there is sorry i thought kevin was talking about the previous picture and i didn't really get it but there's another picture here of the picture of what happens with when a seahorse spots a dragon and also it spews out green fire weird it's pretty lame dragon too but a lame dragon is still cooler than no dragon the final two sections of the book are the pharmalogical and recipe sections the pharmalogical sections features drawings of apothecary jars and specific portions of plants especially a lot of plant roots the recipe section is exactly what it sounds like and it doesn't include any pictures each individual recipe is marked with a star in the margin so the reader will know where one entry begins the next one ends which is a really nice touch of the author to do despite making sure that no one would ever be able to read this book when i first learned about the contents of the book my initial thought was that it was a medieval version of the old farmer's almanac an annual publication for farmers and gardeners that includes information about planting astrological charts weather predictions for the entire year and some random fun stuff thrown in in this case crudely drawn naked women dragons however people much smarter than me have a better suggestion as to what the manuscripts contained old farmers almanac that sounds like okay there's some good information in there like about planting i'm not sure what astronomical chants are gonna do and look back in the day no one's predicting the weather for the entire year other than it's probably gonna be warmer in the summer and spring it's gonna get colder in the autumn and towards winter they're like great work farmers almanac it's totally different to last year i'm glad i bought this new one while the exact contents aren't known it is believed that this was some sort of scientific manual of course when i say scientific it's important to remember that at the time this was written science and magic weren't grouped into the same category and there's likely a lot about chemical information inside the codex as well as medical with the book being impossible to read literally anything could be contained on these pages maybe it holds the secrets of the philosopher's stone the cure for cancer or maybe it's just a bunch of now debunked pseudoscientific herbal remedies what we can say for sure is that until the unknown is decoded all of these options or will be equally likely though they're not they're not equally more likely it's most likely to just be built meet wilfried voynich now that we have at least an idea of what the manuscript looks like it's time to try and figure out where it came from despite the mysterious nature of the codex we actually know a lot more about where the book came from and where it's been than what we know about what it says and naturally it gets the name voynich manuscript from his previous owner wilfred voynich wilfred was born in 1865 in a polish lithuanian noble family and then the russian empire now present-day lithuania his original name was much more polish but given the roughly fifteen to one consonant of our ratio and polish words i'm not going to punish simon by making him try and pronounce it wilfred was a studious young man who pursued chemistry chemistry at moscow university and became a licensed pharmacist despite being educated well employed and noble birth wilfred wasn't very happy with the state of the russian empire it was a time of great upheaval in russian society and marked by massive repression of the citizenry and multiple assassination attempts on the sars one of which was successful during this time wilfred joined the proletariat a polish revolutionary nationalist group during an attempt to free fellow revolutionaries from a warsaw prison he was arrested and shipped off to siberia for the nerdy wilfred this wasn't bad at first he treated it as another trip to college constantly reading and studying i guess he did have to do any like gulag later then did he as a result of his imprisonment he somehow developed a permanent stoop as well as contracted tuberculosis an antibiotic which wouldn't be developed until 20 years after his death that's depressing isn't it man i'm so glad we live in a world with antibiotics just just appreciate that just appreciate how good that is it's so good my internet might not work but i've got antibiotics i mean i'm not on the right now or anything but it's like if i got an infection it's like most likely i'll be fine my granddad was just in hospital with an infection he's an old ass man and you're like he's like really see he's like you know he's like okay he's like in his mid-90s and they just like hook him up to some antibiotics and they're like let's clear him out it's like okay and then he leaves hospitality i only in a few days antibiotics everybody despite the lack of treatment for the lung disease at the time over the next 40 years it would never once occur to the well-educated wilfred that maybe just maybe he should stop chain-smoking ah the past the glorious time when it was like smoking is awesome and good for you now it's just like smoking is awesome but destroys your body i don't smoke i i smoke cigars occasionally i don't smoke cigarettes never have but it's like i love the smell of cigarettes the burning smoke of like a good cigarette smells great i've tried cigarettes of course like everybody um but it's like yeah this is really nice i could really get addicted to this [ __ ] so i don't smoke because it will destroy my body but imagine back in the day the glorious timer is like this thing that's amazing that's amazing it's also good for you helps you lose weight all this stuff no damage to your lungs marlboro told me in 1890 after three years of imprisonment wilfred finally decided that even with plenty of time to read and study being a siberian prisoner didn't really suit him it took three attempts but he was able to escape with the use of a fake passport he first escaped into mongolia then traveled to peking and then to hamburg by this point he was out of money so to acquire a ticket to london he had to sell his jagged and eyeglasses which i'm sure made the already unpleasant voyage by boat cold and boring yes it's tell you okay so not my glasses i need those to read it's the only form of entertainment i have once wilfred arrived in london he set out trying to find fellow revolutionary sergius stepniak this took him quite a while as the address he carried on a slip of paper was written in russian but he finally found a local who could read it and direct him to stepniak's residence in the east end of london one of stepniak's associates was a woman by the name of ethel lillian boole there's a story that wilfred had looked out of his prison window on easter sunday in 1887 and saw russell there in a black dress this is probably just romanticized bullsh but i've had crazier coincidences in my romantic life so i'll just give his completely unverifiable story the benefit of the doubt what's nice of you kevin i'm like they continued their work as revolutionaries founding the society of friends for a free russia a few years after their revolutionary work began from london stepniak died in a railcar accident wilfred stopped his political activism shortly after this though the untimely death of his friend and colleague was only one of the precipitating factors another important factor was that there's not a lot of money in activism wilfred and ethel had been romantically involved and living together but london isn't exactly known for being affordable so it's time to go and get real jobs reality bites doesn't it wilfred it's like yeah i know i really love doing this thing but you know unless you're a lottery winner or you got a trust fund mate you got at some point get a job don't you the final factor that led to the decision was the views of other revolutionaries their general opinion was you know we really hate star nicholas ii and the entire romanov dynasty but we kind of hate wilfred moore that's right wilfred voynich was a bit of a dick and without his friend there to bathroom anymore it was probably best if he and his abrasive attitude just went their own separate ways with their revolutionary work behind them it was time to make some cash money baby ethel became a successful novelist and translator most famous for her book the gadfly well wilfred i feel like i've heard of that have i really heard of that or have i heard of something similar to that because that's quite the coincidence while wilfred became an aquarian bookseller and don't put a shop in london in 1898 in 1902 after 10 years of living as husband and wife the couple would finally marry and wilfred would get his british citizenship it was this time that he had his name anglicized to wilfred voynich the following year was when the mystery of the voynich manuscript would begin a jesuit college at frascati outside of rome was holding a secret book sale selling off some of their collection to the vatican archive one of the reasons the sale was a secret was because the vatican storehouse was literally called the vatican secret archive until 2019 when they change they're much less tantalizing vatican apostolic archive the vatican secretary because when it's secret archive it's like there's all sorts of secret [ __ ] in there it's like nah it's just the old name for our library it's disappointing i ever made a video once about things that might be hidden inside the vatican secret archives and it was absurd because obviously none of the [ __ ] was actually hidden in there because it's all bull but that video got lots of views because people click on that so hard we should do a decoding unknown about the vatican secret archives it would it would do well it would make old fat boys some money the other reason it was a secret is that the jesuits selling the books didn't actually have permission from their superiors to do so how the hell wilfred ever found out about this sale is unknown but he was somehow able to insert himself into the negotiations it took a full nine years for a deal to finally be reached which really makes you wonder how the sellers whenever caught and by the higher-ups at the seminary wilfried was able to purchase a lot of various books and included among them was the manuscript that would receive his name he had already sold off several of the books before even making his way back to london this wasn't about intellectual curiosity or preserving knowledge it was about cold hard cash well of course it was he was a bookseller it's literally how he makes his money we can't judge him for being like oh and then he did a preserve of the books for austerity because he's not a [ __ ] museum we already discussed this he didn't win the lottery he doesn't have a trust fund he has to make some money that's okay but you should have preserved them no that is precisely why wilfred did not sell the manuscript while flipping the other items that he purchased he immediately recognized that this book was something special it was something unique it was something that was going to make him a goddamn fortune as soon as he decoded it but before that could happen germany decided they wanted to take over the world sick of fighting for his beliefs when there was money to be made instead wilfred and ethel moved to new york in 1914 and he opened a second bookstore the following year the world would finally get their first look at the poynic manuscript a little light went on on my internet router my internet's back baby it only took you three and a half hours vodafone i expect that taking off my bill they're never gonna do that of course they won't [ __ ] [ __ ] six degrees of roger bacon when wilfred first revealed the mysterious codex the world in 1915 it was not under the name the voynich manuscript but as the roger bacon cipher manuscript he'd organized several exhibitions to show off nearly 300 of his most valuable books and manuscripts touring princeton university new york city the art institute of chicago and two stops in michigan it was at these michigan exhibitions after the manuscript had started gaining notoriety that he would reveal the story of the book's origins the first half of the story is a total lie he claimed to have found it and other manuscripts hid in a castle in austria where not even the castle's owner had known they existed before we disregard everything wilfred is going to say as a lie it's important to remember that he had to keep the true origin of his illicit book deal secret the works he purchased from the jesuits as well as those purchased by the vatican all had a page of bibliographical notes attached to the front cover including a tight piece of paper that read from the library of p beck's which was glued to the page wilfred had removed these pages to conceal the sale and his tale of austrian castles was a lie of necessity what was not a lie was the letter it found hidden within the front cover of the manuscript the letter was written in 1665 by johannes marcus markey a doctor and alchemist from prague to athansius kircher a jesuit scholar and polymath in rome marty had inherited the book from a friend of his a friend who had obsessively toiled over translation attempts and who also had tried to contact kirchner about it before both marcy and his friend believed that kirchner was the only person in the world to be able to decipher the manuscript nazi goes on to state that dr raphael the czech language tutor of king ferdinand iii told in the manuscript had previously been owned by emperor rudolph rudolph allegedly paid 600 ducats for the book raphael also claimed that the original author of the book was english philosopher roger bacon though marcy withheld judgment on that matter as for the purchase price in terms of currency valuation slash buying power 600 buckets would have been equivalent to a little over fifteen thousand dollars in today's money however ducats were gold and the value of 600 buckets of gold is worth about 125 000 either way it's a very expensive book and also people should have bought gold right wilfred seemed to take this letter at face value believing that roger bacon was indeed the error that's not true though is it shouldn't have bought that you should have just put that 15 000 pounds in like the market and waited because then you'd be like a billionaire or something crazy what was this like back in the day hundreds of years ago yeah yeah you'll be you'll be good it'd be real good corporate seemed to take the letter at face value believing that roger bacon was indeed the original author especially as he was known for writing in code he also felt that given everything that was known about the book a hundred thousand dollars that's 1.4 million dollars today was a perfectly reasonable asking prize for the manuscript he was wrong and he would die in 1930 without it ever having been sold essel became the sole owner of the manuscript until her death in 1960 when it was inherited by her close friend and wilfred's former secretary ann nill wilfred had been very detailed regarding the rules for the sale of the manuscript and finally less than a year after becoming the owner and nil found a buyer the codex was finally sold to new york book dealer hans p krauss though and got less than a quarter of wilfred's asking price pads purchased the book for twenty four thousand five hundred dollars however he felt the wilfred's appraisal of the book was accurate and he immediately offered it for sale for 160 thousand dollars roughly the same price wilfred had been asking for or when adjusted for inflation but look things are worth what people are willing to pay it's like you can value it or whatever you want but if you can't sell it for that price then it's not worth that much and your valuation is incorrect that's just economics isn't it hans's attempt to sell the manuscript saw no more success than wilfred's had and after eight years he gave up and donated it along with marty's letter to the beidecker rare book and manuscript library at yale university where they remain today until the 1990s there seemed to be no documentation of the manuscript existing other than the book itself and the single letter from marcy leading many to believe that the book was a hoax perpetrated by wilfred in an attempt to make some money this theory has been thoroughly debunked so if the manuscript is genuine then where exactly did it come from who was the previous owner that gave the book to marcy and if it had indeed belonged to emperor rudolf who did he acquire it from and why did he pay such a large amount for it was the manuscript indeed authored by roger bacon in the 13th century are we really absolutely sure if it wasn't written by aliens yes kevin we are proof of prominence so far we know that wilfred obtained the book from the jesuits at frascati despite there being no definitive record of where the book was held for the 200 years prior to then with a pretty good idea later letters from marzi revealed that he did eventually send the complete book to kircher upon kirch's death it would have been said to the collegia romano along with the rest of the correspondents where it was stored and ignored for almost two centuries this is all but confirmed by the paper reading from the private library of p becks we mentioned that we mentioned earlier a clue wilfred had completely ignored in his research petrus bex was the head of the jesuit order and the roman college's rector in the mid-1800s he must have taken the manuscript for his personal collection which was later transferred to priscati well wilfred purchased it it was long speculated that the person who owned the point manuscript before marzi was czech alchemist georgias bashkius who worked at the court of rudolf ii it was known that marty had inherited varsius's collection of alchemical books upon his death which was before 1665 so it was a reasonable assumption in 1999 this assumption was proven to be true when the full archive of kirch's correspondence was published online among kirch's correspondence was the letter from baskets that had been alluded to in marcy's letter the letter described what he referred to as a riddle of the sphinx an undecipherable manuscript he described great length and whose description matches that of the voynich manuscript bartius requests the aid of kircher and includes copies of some of the pages that he made himself by hand it was believed that kercher never replied to the letter from basha's and that would not have been surprising the letter from bashas is described as arrogant and self-important by its translators and kircher was a really big deal not the sort of person some minor alchemist should have addressed in that sort of tone but in the 2000s a czech historian discovered a reply letter from kercher to bartius to contextualize the reply bartius's reply would have been roughly equivalent to a high school student asking stephen hawking felt with his physics homework kirch's letter essentially said i'm not impressed by this cute little stegographical book you sent me i have solved many of these before and i could easily do it again with this one you wouldn't even need to be particularly smart to solve it i could do it but i'm far too busy and important obviously not a direct quote but the meaning in tone are accurate kercher was the top scholar of his day who frequently palled around with emperors and his disdain for alchemy certainly didn't help bartius's unsolicited request either with the previous owner now being confirmed as bartius the question then became a matter of how he had received it he was a minor court official and if the book had belonged to emperor rudolph it would seem unlikely that it would have fallen into his hands other than by illicit means to understand how this could happen we have to understand rudolph himself despite being the holy roman emperor pretty important dude rudolph really couldn't be bothered with political affairs this is the problem with like dynasties right it's like you're just like you're always you're born and they're like guess what you're going to be king one day i don't want to be king i want to be a musician's ass come on good news you get to be king he's like you don't have to work you're powerful he's like i don't want it that's the problem when people are born into things i'm watching another bloody tv show called goliath and it's like it reminds me of succession where it's like there's this law firm and they've just that the main lawyers just left it to his daughter and his ex-wife it's like with succession the old man's just left it to his sons and daughter to run the company it's like how about you find someone you know who's uh competent this nepotism is never a good idea because you're really limiting your hiring pool and the chances that your children or you know whoever are going to be the right people to lead your empire it's really small it's really small just go to a business school or go to another company and poach someone come on succession's the worst example of this it's like dude just hire someone for another company what are you doing and then all the children could go live on an island it's fine and not like banished to an island like elba i mean like they'll go buy an island because they'll be so rich from all the work that you know the capital it's capitalism come on but speaking of that i am looking forward to my first born son taking over my youtube empire he lived in prague where he was far more interested in scholarly pursuits with his circle of friends including the likes of johannes kepler and tiju brahe rudolph loved collecting books particularly books on alchemy and the occult he would also pay more for these books than the 600 ducats allegedly paid for the voynich manuscript though the book is not present in the thorough and well-preserved catalogue of rudolph's book purchases neither are many of the other alchemical books he purchased so this did not serve as proof one way or the other the confirmation that rudolph was almost certainly the owner came from the manuscript itself on the first folio wilfred discovered a faded almost invisible signature he was able to enhance the signature using unknown chemicals and discovered the signature looked like that of jacobus horzitsky de tepenets although this signature had faded over the years it can still be seen on the manuscript using ultraviolet light detects was a well-respected alchemist and position and was appointed imperial chemist he quickly became one of rudolph's favorites and it is cited that in 1609 he cured rudolf of a grave but unspecified illness it is likely around this time that the panettes would have received the manuscript as a gift from rudolph however it is also known that rudolph died owing money to tepenet so the manuscript could also have been given to him towards payment of the debt when the holy roman empire owes you money nor you shouldn't have to worry about that he's the only emperor although i suppose he could be like i'm not paying you what you're gonna do about it either way the signature of dipterminettes along with everything we know about rudolph gives credence to marcy's claims that the book had once belonged to the emperor himself the link between taponets and bashkias is unknown but more importantly so is all of the history of the manuscript before it fell into the hands of emperor rudolph we know that the voynich manuscript remained in prague from the time rudolph purchased it until marcy sent it to kircher in rome nothing definitive about the ownership before then is known but there's still plenty more that we do know for example we know that either the claim that the manuscript was written by roger bacon is scientifically impossible or that bacon must have been an immortal vampire and as we all know he was an immortal vampire she blinded me with science there are a wide range of theories regarding the origins and purpose of the voynich manuscript far too many for us to cover instead let's eliminate as many as possible first through the use of our good old friend science with the paper trail of the origins of the mysterious codex having gone cold it was time to examine the paper itself in 2009 various sections of the parchment underwent radiocarbon dating at the university of arizona all of the samples gave consistent results dating from between 1410 and 1438. this was over a century after bacon had died so we can rule him out as a suspect this almost certainly rules out the idea of it being a hoax by wilfred himself as he would have had to acquire a large amount of vintage parchment all from almost exactly the same time period even for an antiquarian bookseller that's a pretty big ask especially when combined with the fact that a 2014 multi-spectrum analysis showed that the parchment had not previously been written on one possible source of hope for narrowing down the book's origins came from the belief that the parchment was made from goat skin this would have been important as goat skin was used almost exclusively in greece it was known that the bindings and copper of the book itself was made of goat skin but bindings are obviously much thicker and thus more identifiable than the parchment itself the aforementioned 2014 study also included protein testing which proved that the parchment itself was actually calfskin unfortunately calfskin was the most common parchment in all of europe at this time period so that didn't narrow things down the reason the cover add parchment uh different materials is the book appears to have been rebound at least once there are insect holes on the first and last pages of the parchment indicating the original cover was likely wooden and was replaced following insect damage the next step was to analyze the ink the text and outlines of the drawings were made with a quill pen using iron gold ink paints are mineral based with crushed azerite for the blue red ochre and hematite for the red and so on those materials are all appropriate for a book created in the 15th and the 16th century all of this is saying like if this is a forgery like a later forgery i mean that doesn't mean i think that i personally believe but a spoiler alert that not spoiler alert but i you know i'm familiar with this from you know i've done videos about the point of manuscript before for sure um i believe it was just a prank by someone back in the day like hundreds of years ago and this pretty much rules out the fact that it was a book made later in later centuries to look old because that would be an incredible forgery you've just been pranked you idiot and there are no anachronistic materials anywhere in the codex to indicate it's a modern forgery there we go scientific analysis of the materials used to construct this manuscript indicate that it was genuinely produced by someone in the 15th century though this does not mean the text is meaningful in any way instead of gibberish an interesting tidbit about the paint is that would have all required immense skill painting using mineral paint is difficult and the larger the crystals the more difficult it is and despite that it sort of looks like it was made by a child to achieve the bright vibrant colors seen in the manuscript would have cried painting with large crystals and the author seems to be extraordinarily technically talented at using these paints however in terms of actual artistic ability many of the paintings seem of childlike quality at best yes personally i'm not sure whether or not this actually means anything i'm confident i could have learned to create these mineral-based paints and to effectively apply them to parchment but i would never have been able to paint anything that looked like anything still this juxtaposition is often brought up as significant so i guess standard expectations of the artistic ability of any learned individual were a lot different during the middle ages words words words so let's take a closer look at the text of the manuscript itself as that is where the true meaning of this document lies assuming that there is any meaning and it's not just total nonsense the words are made up of characters forming a never before seen language that has that has come to be known as boeing keys that language consists of 25 different letters with upper case versions of a few of the letters and i'm looking at a little table now of what people it seems to be like people have tried to match them up to the roman letters but not very successfully and obviously because it just it doesn't look right from the viewpoint of a native english speaker the use of some of the letters is a bit odd in terms of analyzing the structure of the actual word some letters only appear at the beginning of a word some only appear at the end and some can only be in the middle of a word some letters are never followed by other specific letters and some letters can appear two or even three times in a row the fact that there are letters that could be used at the beginning or end of words but never in the middle is unheard of in indo-european languages which led many people to believe that voyniches is based in hebrew however statistical analysis of the distribution of the letters and their correlations found that the language is much more similar to mandarin chinese opinion romanized text of chinese than it is to other proposed languages there are also two peculiarities that make deciphering the language so difficult one is that there's an abnormally high repetition of words that only differ by a single letter the next is that some of the more common words in the manuscript can appear up to three times in a row both of these result in any simple substitution decryption method to invariably result in gibberish however this assumes that all of these words are meaningful in the analysis of the materials of the book it was found that the parchment was essentially flawless there were no signs that the author made a single correction once pen was put to paper that was the end of it it seems utterly impossible to construct such a massive manuscript without making a single mistake even when copying from a first draft so it's quite possible that some of the words are the results of accidents and were just left in as any visible corrections could give the reader hints to how to decode the text wow yeah i didn't think about i was like how okay to avoid giving hints that's interesting so if some of the words could have no meaning is it possible that none of the words have meaning and the book really is a hoax just one originally created hundreds of years before anyone important got their hands on it well anything is possible if you try hard to believe in it yourself but in this case it's not very likely okay so it's not very likely this is a hoax i really thought this was a hoax a 2014 study out of the university of sao paulo analyzed the frequency and relationship of the various words throughout the text they used this data to create a three-dimensional model of the book structure and word frequency when compared to the models generated by other books in ninety percent of cases the voynich manuscript had a similar model meaning that the book is almost certainly an actual language and not a complicated fast wow i didn't even know i didn't know that fact that's crazy okay that completely changes it so this could be decipherable which is crazy because people have been trying forever are we gonna one day invent a super computer that can do this that'd be great and it'll just turn out to be some boring alchemy book you know how to make gold and people will try and it won't work obviously it's also theorized the manuscript was written by more than one person each performing slightly different forms of encoding this has resulted in sections being broken down into voyniches a and voyniches b naturally this will only result in making the manuscript even more challenging to translate i really wish kirchner hadn't been so busy otherwise oh he could have had this entire book decoded centuries ago but why now at this point you might be shouting your scream but simon and also to a lesser extent kevin why what could possibly be written in this book that required this level of secrecy well as for the answer it's almost certainly disappointing but it is also the reason that secrecy was required the parchment dates back to the early to mid 1400s and we know that until marcy shipped it to rome it spent much of its time in prague at the time prague was both the capital and cultural center of the holy roman empire the parchment itself also dated to just before the inquisition meaning that the inquisition may have already begun while the text was still being written there's a large misconception that the church was anti-science though many great scholars of the day were actually members of the clergy who else in those times had the resources free time and education to leisurely engage in intellectual pursuits oh i see i see where kevin is going with this one church and science you know that don't get super along so there's going to be something written in this book was it copernicus who was also like religious and then he also was like hated by the church because he was like we're not the center of the universe oh no copernicus but i think someone is writing in this something that's like slightly heretical and they're encoding it so the church doesn't see it that makes sense but then why haven't we been able to decode it because we know for reference do we but we've decoded so much stuff come on let's go though they were generally fans of intellectual endeavors specific fields that might challenge the church's established views risk being seen as heresy at a time when miasma theory was regarded as fact both medical and alchemical studies were often conducted in secret and their textbooks were written in code my asthma theory is that one whereas like people thought diseases came from bad smells so they tried to avoid bad smells so they didn't get sick and it's like i mean i mean it's probably gonna help but it's not how it works but good guess guys good guess codes in our chemical books to be shared with others were usually relatively simple perhaps including a simple substitution cipher combined with a lot of abbreviated latin however there was also the matter of trade secrets if a researcher felt they were close to turning lead into gold or cracking the secrets of the philosopher's stone naturally they would not want anyone reading their work even leonardo da vinci's personal notes were written using mirror writing literally just writing everything backwards so that it had to be looked at through a mirror so between fears of religious persecution and paranoia over having one's work stolen in cypherd messages such as this were common to the point that kercher couldn't even be bothered to look at this one out of curiosity obviously we've never seen anything with such a sophisticated level of encryption before but that doesn't mean the contents of the book themselves are anything extraordinary compared to other contemporary works as we've mentioned this is almost certainly some sort of medical and or alchemical book this checks the boxes for all the sections of the book the herbal section would describe the various plants and their uses for books of this particular era of the middle ages the more abstract nature of some of the botanical paintings rather than any attempt at photorealism would be appropriate as the emphasis on at the time was on depicting the healing properties of the plant rather than artistic accuracy the astrological sections did included because at the time astrology actually played a large part in medicine of course it did the pharmaceutical and recipe sections of the book i think are pretty obvious in terms of a medical book indeed so that just leaves the baths as we mentioned before bowel neology is specifically the study of therapeutic bathing and medicinal springs the baths being drawn in the shape of female anatomy combined with the many many naked women throughout this book have led many to believe that is specifically a book on women's health and like maybe reproductive like you go to these springs they drew them like the women's ovaries and they're supposed to help with your like fertility maybe so with everything else finally out of the way it's time to take a look at the top theories regarding the origins of the boenick manuscript authorship theories there's a lot of different names that been thrown around over the years as possible authors of the manuscript most have been debunked thanks to the carbon dating of the materials because of the consistent dating of the materials used to construct the manuscript there are only two specific names that have not yet been ruled out the first is italian physician and engineer giovanni fontana giovanni fits the time period appropriately and he was familiar with cryptography two of his books are encrypted both use much simpler ciphers than the boenick manuscript his name has been suggested largely because he was active at the right time was a physician was familiar with some forms of cryptography and because some of his illustrations kind of look sort of like the images are in the manuscript it's not a great argument but it's theoretically possible why could it only be two people there must be like millions of people alive at that time we can't know possibly all of them couldn't this just be some prankster sitting in a like basement somewhere just drawing these things for fun the other name comes to us from nick pelling a programmer who worked on games like mortal kombat 2 primal rage and street fighter 3 alpha ok needless to say the mysteries of the voynich manuscript have garnered attention from all types of investigators nick put forth the theories that the author was italian architect antonio avellino better known as filorete while best known for his architectural work fellarate mentioned a series of little works of secrets in one of his books these undiscovered little works are presumed to have either been lost to time or never actually created but filorete claimed that they were on topics of agriculture spas recipes glass making engines and bees obviously we see some parallels there between those topics and the nature of the manuscript and it goes on to suggest that many of the herbal pages are mechanical engines that were visually encoded to look like strange plants ah this one seems like a bit of a stretch my dude i'm assuming the engine part of that theory triggered a tangent from simon very short one it like seems like a stretch my dude oh well i can't see what he said i'm willing to bet that he and i are on the same page here filareto was a known associate of some of the top cryptographers of the day but with the little works being either lost or imaginary there is no proof that he ever published works on the topics that appear to be in the voynich manuscript i find this theory to be dubious at best yeah me too kevin i don't think this one is very likely at all but it is not yet disproven and it's also the coolest proposal out there the absolute legends have been listening to some talk about a dusty old book for over an hour at this point well not quite i guess i'm going fast today so it'd be rather fulfilling to know that at the end of all it turns out to be instructions to build some badass 15th century steam bunk engines rather than the more probable and mundane reality yes all these things is like the avoiding manuscript is super interesting uh there must be like thousands of youtube videos about this right and then as soon as we find out the reality when we if we eventually do no one will care about those videos anymore because it'll be like we figured it out and it's boring it's like some scientists writing about herbal remedies from plants that don't exist anymore or that obviously don't work or any of that stuff then there'll be no more videos and no one will care because we'll have solved the mystery as we know mysteries are interesting and they get views and speaking of probable and mundane reality there is what i consider to be the most likely authorship theory of them all the book was written by some rando that we've never heard of there were about 80 million people living in europe at the time the manuscript was written did you really think the author was going to be one of the 20 names you'd actually recognize exactly obviously it would be cool if this was a childhood work of leonardo da vinci a theory that has been proposed and largely dismissed but it's just not very likely many of the details surrounding the book point to it being from northern italy one particular detail that receives a lot of attention is a sketch of castle with swallow tail parapets known as a gibberleen fortification okay something that was only present in castles in the 15th century in northern italy a recent theory speculates that the author was almost certainly jewish and that the bars depicted represent communal jewish baths known as mikvars which are still used by orthodox jewish women to clean themselves after childbirth menstruation i just learned about this reason i went to israel recently and i just learned my mate's been living out there for a year for work and uh i was like he was telling me about this and he's like yeah the women have to go to the rabbi and he'll tell them if they've uh if their menstruation period is over and i'm like that's [ __ ] up but he's like dude i know religion's weird the theory explains that the only place women would have been bathing together in europe in the 1400s would have been in a mikvah the theory is supported by the common proposition that voiceness is at least partially based in hebrew and by the fact that many of the women depicted in the manuscript are clearly visibly pregnant that's the official stance on the drawings at least personally i thought they were just poor drawings with inconsistent proportions but i'll default to the experts on this one yeah they're just that i didn't think they were pregnant i i didn't even know they were women so i was like oh wait they got rests they just look like weird babies in the womb we did briefly address the notion that this was a hoax created by wilfred wilfred voynich himself and the impossibility of that but well i know i'm possible just extremely unlikely but that does not mean that the book was made as a hoax in the 15th century when both wilfred and hans krauss got their hands on the manuscript they immediately saw dollar signs some of the debunked theories speculated it was created as a hoax to be sold to emperor rudolph a piles of gold and while the carbon dating indicates that it was nearly impossible that it was created specifically to bilk rudolph that doesn't mean it wasn't created to con a different target instead without knowing how rudolph came into possession the manuscript it's impossible to trace back who the intended target of such a hoax would have been though the hoax theory is possible i find this to be a bit unlikely as well as it would be a huge gamble the manuscript appears to be copied from a draft possibly by one or more people and possibly by people who couldn't read or understand what they were copying this combined with the sheer length of the manuscript shows that it would have taken a lot of time and dedication obviously that's not out of the question if the suspected payoff was worth it but there was a big financial investment as well the mineral paints used were not cheap and while a higher quality manuscript would command a higher value it's a big upfront investment based on speculation yeah agreed i mean i do think but the fact that the fact that the letters add up so perfectly wasn't it like 90 like other languages i've really changed my opinion on this i don't think it's a hoax i just think it's something we haven't managed to translate yet i do i think it's got some interesting stuff in it no definitely not still don't think so um i don't think it's a hoax anymore just because unless they were just like but they came up with such a perfect cipher that no one's been able to crack language theories there are three main categories as to how the text of the manuscript was written these are the it's either plain text encoded text or meaningless we've already addressed the likelihood that it's almost certainly not meaningless though that is still possible so that just leaves plain text and encoded if the book is plain text there are a few ways this would be possible the first is that it's natural language which is to say any language that evolved through the natural course of human history by repeated use of words and sounds statistical analysis of the text shows many similarities to natural languages one of the reasons it is likely not meaningless chipperish this theory posits that the book is using a little-known natural language and an invented alphabet in 1976 a linguist at the nsa speculated that it was hitherto unknown north germanic dialect while earlier proposals thought it might be an east asian language as for the nature of the invented alphabet it's not as outlandish as it might sound spoken in written languages developed separately and many natural languages had no written alphabet most famously neither russian or japan never developed written language on their own japan learned how to write from chinese in the 5th century and russia was taught the cyrillic alphabet by saint clement of ored in the 9th or 10th century it's possible that the author spoke an obscure natural language that had no written alphabet and decided to write their secret textbook in that language using an alphabet of their own creation so that no one else would ever be able to read it in terms of the author ever needing to decode what they wrote down this certainly seemed like the most simple solution as they would simply be reading a book in a language that they knew how to speak rather than messing around with complex ciphers the next possibility for the book being plain text is if it was a constructed language now that we've defined a natural language i'm sure you can guess what a constructed language is it's going to be like something made up right like is esperanto would be an example of that like a language that people created on purpose well the idea of a constructed language is all by our standards the manuscript allegedly predates the concept of one by over a century i don't care for that argument against it because while the notion of a constructed language may not have been part of mainstream consciousness it's not like it's some crazy idea that a person couldn't have come up with on their own especially when trying to encode something ultimately as the book is likely in medical text there's always the possibility that it was a constructed language to make it more readable not less it's been hypothesized that this may have been a primitive attempt at a universal language like a prototypical esperanto boom kevin and i are definitely on the same page today considering such a language never gained enough notoriety for it to have been mentioned anywhere else if true it would certainly support the theory that the author wasn't actually anyone important in the grand scheme of human history the final means by which this could be a plain text book is if it was written by a mentally ill person suffering from glossolalia or speaking in tongues apparently being compelled to write large amounts of text is common in this condition though the use of an invented alphabet is much rarer most researchers find this theory unlikely i just thought it was fun that the whole thing could just be some crazy person writing down the voices in their head the best part is that until the text is deciphered there's absolutely no way to prove or disprove this theory so we're saying there's a chance it's just unlikely it's going to be i i think it's probably a constructed language that would be my vibe but it's totally just a guess is it someone writing in tongues seems less likely this brings us to the theories that the text is encoded in some way but how the issue with the book is that if it were a cipher as was the prevailing theory for most of the 20th century none of the ciphers that were consistent with the era the book was written in result in any meaningful text this means that it's probably not a cipher but a code which brings us back to everyone's two favorite tricks from the cicada 3301 puzzles that's right it's time to talk about book codes there's a theory that the entire manuscript is written using a book code as the internal structure and length distribution of many of the voyniches words look similar to roman numerals this theory seems a little absurd to me as each page of text would contain so little information that if it were if it were a book code not to mention what a gruelingly unpleasant experience it would be for the author to need to decode it anytime they wanted to remember what they wrote yeah it's good that's crazy it would take forever it would take forever to make and it would take forever to decode but if the code book cipher theory actually is true even if the manuscript itself could be accurately translated to numbers good luck finding the right book to apply those numbers to yeah in this in that case it's lost like you're going to find the right book from the 14th century that decodes this book it's never going to happen next is steganography the theory states that most of the text is meaningless but that there are significant bits of data hidden among the text it could be something as simple as the second letter of every word or something more subjective like the length of certain pen strokes in fact there are contemporary examples of steganographical it's a long ass word works that use letter shape to conceal information unfortunately this is extremely difficult to check as the exact method by which the meaningful information is hidden would be seemingly arbitrary and it may not even be consistent throughout the entire manuscript the final form of code would be the easiest for the author to read and that would be if it's simply some form of shorthand there are occasionally notes written in the margins in abbreviated latin and the final passage of the book is written in a combination avoid cheese and abbreviated latin it's possible that boing cheese is just the author's own form of shorthand that they either never talked to anyone else or that they presented and the scientific community rejected wrap up for centuries the voynich manuscript was like the one ring forged by sauron in the fires of ora druin boyle rings reference isn't it no idea never seen it or read it it became the singular obsession of anyone through whose hands it passed then it was sent to athanasius kircher who just couldn't be bothered and went neglected until finally being unearthed by wilfried voynich since then rather than being a singular pursuit the search for an answer has resulted in the brightest minds of the world creating a fellowship of sorts sorry simon no more lord of the rings references yeah kevin i guess kevin knows i don't i don't know all the rings at all oh fellowship oh i see ah i did get it but now i get it because i know one of the fellowship of the ring right the manuscript has been intensely researched from every possible angle for over a century and it really was the best and brightest working on cracking the book the most talented code breakers from both world wars the same people who cracked germany's enigma code have tried and failed to solve this riddle even with our most sophisticated computing algorithms and statistical research all that we've learned is that it almost definitely actually says something rather than being gibberish but we're no close to reading it than marcy was 400 years ago there have been many claims over the years of people saying they cracked the code but each one has been systematically debunked many of these supported decryptions are ludicrous on the surface involving highly subjective elements in one particularly outlandish instance the system for decoding the passage allowed a single page to be translated in a thousand different ways or forming meaningless text that's not that's not a system that's not you've not done it then you've not cracked it an accurate solution to the manuscript would not be so fickle executive director of the medieval academy of america lisa fagan davis said it best when denouncing a particular 2019 claim that the manuscript had been translated quote as with most would-be voynic interpreters the logic of this proposal is circular and aspirational he starts with the theory about what a particular series of glyphs might mean usually because of the word's proximity to an image that he believes he could interpret he then investigates any number of medieval romance language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory he then argues that because he has found a romance language word that fits his hypothesis his hypothesis must be right his translations from what is essentially gibberish and amalgam of multiple languages are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations she goes on to describe his paper as self-fulfilling nonsense while this is a particularly scathing review it's ultimately the fate of any supposed claim to decode the manuscript for all the effort that has gone into solving it we're still absolutely no closer to solving the mystery of what is contained on those pages who wrote it or how it made its way probably from italy temporary rudolph in prague but you know what that's totally okay this show is about unsolved mysteries because old mysteries are usually a lot more boring totally mentioned earlier like when we find this it's gonna be like no more videos about it because no one cares because it's boring considering the mundane reality that the manuscript is almost certainly just a medical book full of outdated and debunked remedies written by some random position of little to no notoriety the notion the longer we can hold on to the mystery the better yeah i kind of agree this is going to be so disappointing is that when you find out the trick behind the magic trick you're like oh boring anyway this has been an episode of decoding the unknown thank you so much for being here watching or listening if you're watching smash that like button make sure you subscribe if you're listening as a podcast hey leaving a review really does help this show out that would be amazing thank you so much and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 518,073

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Id: NGvZL_SIZJ0

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022