The 15th century Voynich Maniscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon since it was discovered in 1969.

The manuscript is full of texts in an unknown language, and weird pictures of naked women, strange objects and zodiac symbols.

The mystery behind the books seems to have been unravelled now, and the “code” seems to have been cracked.

This success is attributed to History Researcher and Television Writer, Nicholas Gibbs, who discovered that the book is actually a guide to women’s health, that is mostly plagiarised from other guides of the era.

The text, it is now believed, would have been familiar to anyone who had an interest in Medicine at the time.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs.

“The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque/decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis/radix (root), s a iij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.” So, this was not a code at all; it was just shorthand.