Quote:We do not know for definite in which country the manuscript was written. We cannot say whether the VMS is in a known language, is in some sort of cypher
Actually when people tried to crack hieroglyphs and Linear B they also had no idea what language was it written in.
Today people in Egypt speak Arabic. Champollion could expect that hieroglyphs are not in Arabic. But if not Arabic then what?
It turned out that they are in extinct language which we call today Ancient Egyptian. It is similar to still exisiting Coptic so people were able to understand it. But the job of reading the hieroglyphs actually involved 2 steps - reading the symbols and learning the language by comparing it to Coptic.
The same is with Linear B. Many candidate languages were considered for it, like for example Etruscan. Only when Ventris cracked the first few words it turned out that it was some very ancient Greek. I believe it was actually a surprise for scientists.