ALAMY Dealer Wilfrid Voynich

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Since being rediscovered in 1912, scholars have devoted countless hours attempting to decipher its meaning. It has been claimed to be evidence of a lost civilisation, or even the work of aliens taunting us with hidden details of their plans to invade Earth. Others have insisted that it holds the key to the meaning of life, pinpoints the location of the Ark of the Covenant or reveals how to turn base metal into gold. Alternatively could it all be a giant hoax? For all the head scratching over a document once described as "the most mysterious in the world" no one has been able to provide a definitive answer. Now a British expert claims to have finally solved the mystery. Nicholas Gibbs, a leading authority on medieval medical manuscripts, is convinced that it's a health manual for wealthy Elizabethan women. He has spent the last three years poring over the document, which is named after Wilfrid Voynich. The London book dealer unveiled the manuscript to a gullible public 105 years ago, claiming it was the work of 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon. According to Voynich, the document was written in unbreakable code to keep the contents secret from the church. The book dealer's explanation was later discredited and it is widely accepted he invented his story of the manuscript's origins to boost its price. Now Gibbs claims that the script is actually written in Latin abbreviations. He is convinced that the Voynich manuscript, with its many images of plants, is a sort of recipe book for herbal remedies. He is surprised that the mystery, which even defied the wartime codebreakers at Bletchley Park, has taken so long to crack, adding: "It is easy, that is the extraordinary thing."

ALAMY Some of the world's finest minds have grappled with the riddle of the Voynich manuscript

He says the key was understanding that the symbols were not entire words but shortcuts and that an index that would have made the document much easier to understand has been mislaid over the centuries. Bathing has been regarded as a common cure since Roman times while the plant images point to aromatherapy, an alternative therapy found in many ancient societies. Other symbols in the manuscript relate to the signs of the zodiac, which have long held a place in healing. Scientific studies have previously proved that the 240-page document, which is held in a library at Yale University in the US, dates from the 1400s. That rules out Bacon as the author. "People got it into their heads that it was written in code," adds Gibbs. "But it's now more or less clear that it is a reference book of remedies. Human beings are not naturally complicated - they look for short cuts all over the place."

ALAMY The document is said to have once passed through the hands of Rudolf II

He believes that the intended audience would have been wealthy women, seeking cures for gynaecological ailments and conditions. The manuscript was produced on vellum, a type of calf skin. Gibbs believes that Voynich was a charlatan who revelled in the attention that the mystery generated and encouraged "the crackpots and conspiracy theories". His conclusions have echoes of the findings of Stephen Bax who is now with the Open University. In 2015 the linguist wrote: "With apologies to conspiracy theorists, I (boringly) consider the Voynich manuscript most probably to be an attempt at an encyclopaedia aiming to encompass contemporary knowledge of plants, astrology and astronomy and related areas." Bax, like Gibbs, believes there was no attempt by the original author of the manuscript to conceal its contents, merely that the language was lost in the mists of time. Voynich claimed to have bought the manuscript in Italy along with a number of second-hand books. Describing his find he said later: "My attention was drawn to one volume. It was such an ugly duckling, compared with the other manuscripts, with their rich decorations that my attention was roused at once. I found that it was written entirely in cipher. I became convinced that it must be a work of exceptional importance." It's been claimed previously that the author of the Voynich manuscript was not Roger Bacon, as the book dealer had people believe, but a Jewish physician based in northern Italy. An image of a castle in the document shows a building style unique to that part of the world. Later the document is said to have once passed through the hands of Rudolf II, emperor of the Habsburg Empire in Prague and collector of occult artefacts.

ALAMY The London book dealer unveiled the manuscript to a gullible public 105 years ago