Almost everything we believe we know about the Voynich manuscript we don't really know for sure. It's a codex illustrated with strange figures and sketched plants that has been carbon-dated to between 1404 and 1438, and it could've come from Renaissance Italy. But there are discrepancies with this origin theory: the sunflowers shown in the manuscript's pages, for example, didn't grow in Europe during the 15th century.

There is no default, accepted theory to explain the manuscript's provenance, and any theory that gains traction is usually disproven or disregarded by the huge community of amateur and professional Voynich scholars. Ten years ago news reports appeared suggesting the document was a hoax, written 100 years after its carbon-dated vellum suggests. It might've come from Mexico. Or it could've been a philosophical experiment, or a work of art or, according to theoretical physicist Andreas Schinner, put together by an "an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head." Or aliens wrote it.

Professor Bax believes the manuscript — which is available online to read at the Yale Beinecke Library's website — is as old as its carbon-dating suggests. Speaking informally in a question and answer session on Reddit, he said he thought it was probably written in an "invented script, probably by a small group trying to study and pass on knowledge." That group, he said, was based "maybe in a region not far from Europe" such as Turkey, Iran, or the Caucasus. He speculated that they may have died out, possibly as a result of war. There's a huge history of Voynich manuscript scholarship, speculation, and contention — and Bax's take on the origins of the manuscript is just the latest in a centuries-old debate.

Bax's method of deciphering the 10 words and 14 sounds was similar to that used by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young, who were the first to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. Champollion searched for the known names of pharaohs to put symbols against sounds; Bax took words in the manuscript that appeared to annotate specific drawings — seven plants and one constellation — and connected them to the names of things that seemed similar in other languages. Bax connected a word that appeared to label a picture of a juniper plant with an annotation that appeared to read "oror" and noted the similarity between the word and the Arabic and Hebrew word for the same plant, "arar." He moved on in a similar manner, finding connections between known languages and the mystifying manuscript text that seemingly allowed him to decode words such as "taurus" and "coriander" in the 600-year-old document.

The professor is convinced the manuscript is not a hoax. It is, he suggests in his findings, "probably an exploratory treatise on nature," but others have taken issue with his diagnosis. Nick Pelling, whose Cipher Mysteries site is home to research and opinions on coded historical documents, blasted Bax's methodology and findings in a seven-part publication. As one of the internet's most prolific writers on the subject of the Voynich manuscript, Pelling called Bax's readings "subjective," "basically unworkable," and "just ridiculous."

Bax replied in a similarly detailed post, saying that Pelling had "failed to read [Bax's] paper carefully" and jumped to "the wrong conclusions." Pelling's issues are primarily with very specific points in Bax's hypothesis —the coded reference to "coriander," he argues, is believed by some to be a copying error on behalf of the author — but they show just how varied the approaches to decoding the mysterious manuscript have been. He also accuses Bax of using "hopeful" plant identifications that he says are likely incorrect. Arthur Tucker, from the Delaware State University Department of Agriculture, agrees, saying that Bax's plant identifications were "naïve and mostly wrong."

This kind of contention isn't new for the Voynich manuscript. Since its discovery, researchers have taken vastly different approaches to decoding the document and decried other methods. After rediscovering the book at the beginning of the 20th century, Wilfrid Voynich —who added to its mystery by saying he discovered the book in "an ancient castle in southern Europe" — gave the document to William Newbold, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to decode. Newbold became convinced that "tiny squiggles" in the manuscript's text were the key to unlocking its secrets, and asThe New Yorker describes, spent his final years and his fading eyesight with magnifying glass in hand, trying to decode apparent patterns in the random way the centuries-old ink had dried.