Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

[MarcoP]

And I'd like to add one thing. All these ciphers are not similar at all to Voynich Manuscript. The most similar way I can think of would be just coding letters as Roman numerals.

Actually I have seen such cipher, most probably older than Voynich Manuscript.
I don't remember where I have found it but have a look:

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Bede is describing the Greek system to encode numbers. They use all the alphabet to represent numbers (rather than only a few letters, as the Roman system). Bede discusses a system to represent numbers with finger gestures. If one knows both the gesture system and the Greek numbering system, they automatically also have a way to encode the whole alphabet with fingers. So this is about encoding a text with gestures, not a verbose cipher where Greek letters are written by longer Roman numbers.