I. Core Hypothesis The Voynich manuscript is a 15th-century European copy of a 9th–12th century Andalusian/Islamic field guide. The original text documented the flora, astronomy, geography, and medical practices of the Americas (Mesoamerica/Mississippian cultures) using unpointed Arabic shorthand (
Rasm). The manuscript's bizarre cipher is the direct result of a European scribe erroneously copying a Right-To-Left (RTL) Arabic text from Left-To-Right (LTR).
II. The Historical Vector (Transatlantic Contact)- The Explorer: The geographical knowledge originates from early Islamic transatlantic navigation, mirroring the documented 889 AD voyage of the Andalusian navigator Khashkhash ibn Saeed ibn Aswad from Cordoba, who crossed the Atlantic and returned with strange botanical specimens.
- The Documentary Evidence (Al-Masudi): Khashkhash's transatlantic voyage was formally recorded by the renowned 10th-century Arab historian Al-Masudi in his 947 AD encyclopedia, Muruj adh-Dhahab (The Meadows of Gold).
- The Botanical Proof: Folio 93r features an anatomically accurate drawing of a wild sunflower (Helianthus annuus), a plant strictly native to the Americas, definitively proving transatlantic access to New World flora centuries before Columbus.
III. The Geographical & Cosmological Proof- The Rosettes Map (The City on Water): Folio 86v contains a massive fold-out map of a central circular city surrounded by water, heavily segmented and connected by stone causeways. This structurally mirrors early maps of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, or a major Mississippian coastal trade hub, rather than any known European city.
- The Pleiades & The New Fire: Folio 68r maps a central celestial body surrounded by the Pleiades star cluster. In Mesoamerican culture, the zenith of the Pleiades (Tianquiztli) was the survival-critical anchor for their 52-year calendar cycle and the "New Fire" ceremony.
- Equatorial Navigation: Later cosmological fold-outs depict swirling, amorphous star clusters perfectly matching the Magellanic Clouds, visible only when navigating deep southern or equatorial transatlantic trade winds.
IV. The Linguistic Mechanism (The LTR Copyist Error)- The Reversal: The Voynich suffix syllables (like
-al
and
-ar
) are actually the Arabic definite article prefix "Al-" (ال) copied backward by the European scribe.
- The Benches & Tails: The Voynich alphabet is a visual tracing of dotless Andalusi Arabic. Sweeping Voynich tails map to Arabic terminal letters (Nun, Ra, Ya), while Voynich "benches" map to unpointed medial teeth (Ba, Ta, Tha).
- The Gallows Characters: The massive Voynich gallows letters occurring at paragraph starts are misinterpretations of the towering vertical stalks of the Arabic Lam-Alif ligatures and the word "Allah" (الله) from the Bismillah invocation.
V. The Pharmaceutical & Industrial Evidence- The Apothecary Jars (Trade Pottery): Unlike standard 15th-century European glassware, the heavily painted jars in the Pharmaceutical section visually match the geometric, bulbous styles of Mesoamerican or Mississippian trade pottery. The scribe faithfully copied the exotic containers drawn by the explorer.
- The Andalusian Integration (Ibn Juljul): Exotic medicines brought back by explorers were processed by elite Andalusian pharmacists in Cordoba, such as the master botanist Ibn Juljul, who documented how to extract chemical properties from newly discovered foreign plants.
- Reverse-Translated Terminology: When reading Voynich labels backward through the Rasm mapping, exact medieval apothecary terms emerge. The jar label
chol
reverses to the Arabic root L-W-Q (لعوق / La'uq - medicinal syrup), and the plumbing label
olad
reverses to D-L-W (دلو / Dalw - water bucket).
- Tawkid Lafdhi (Verbal Emphasis): The Voynich word reduplication (e.g.,
chol chol
) perfectly mirrors classical Arabic grammatical repetition used in Islamic medical formularies to stress exact measurements.
VI. The Scribal Europeanization- Because the 15th-century Italian or German scribe did not understand the indigenous subjects in the master codex, they updated the illustrations with European elements: placing Italian Ghibelline swallowtail merlons on the walls of the Tenochtitlan map, drawing early 15th-century crossbows, and giving European medieval hairstyles to the bathing nymphs.