Cracking the code

A self-described computer geek, Richard Rogers believes he has cracked a code that has eluded scholars and researchers for more than 500 years.

Mystery has always surrounded the Voynich Manuscript, located at Yale University.

The 240 vellum pages of the hand-written book are so fragile that curators refuse to allow it to be touched. The 6- by 9-inch book contains pictures of plants, nymphs, astrological diagrams and hundreds of lines of undecipherable text matching no known language.

But Rogers, 58, an interactive technician and data management specialist at Fleet Readiness Center East at Cherry Point, used the text to test a set of new pattern recognition algorithms he was working on for the U.S. Customs Service and U.S. State Department and made a discovery.

"I took a random sampling of the text and turned it into a machine code," Rogers said.

He said the software failed the first two times before repeatable patterns in the data came to the surface, leading him to believe that maybe the manuscript was not necessarily a language as was first thought.

"Could it be music? Could it be poetry? Could be mathematics?" he said. "What the heck could it be if it’s not a language? Everybody thinks it’s a language."

Rogers now believes the manuscript is an example of the world’s first spreadsheet.

"It’s a previously unknown form of symbolic algebra," he said.

Rogers said it has taken more than 10,000 hours of computer analysis to decipher the code, and he has deciphered only three pages.

He even applied satellite software developed to find cracks in the surface of Mars from photographs to find depressions of quill strokes on the ancient vellum where the ink had faded away.

The application didn’t discriminate between ancient planets and antiquated text.

"The computer didn’t know the difference," Rogers said.

The work revealed additional characters and led to more understanding.

Rogers has concluded that the manuscript is steganography, that is to say it has secret messages hidden within pictures.

"It’s mathematical," Rogers said. "The underlying foundation to this document is an

8-by-8 grid, exactly like a checker board, which, by the way, is a Masonic symbol.

"It has numbers down the sides and letters across the top and bottom. This document is algebra, but it is a coordinate system that teaches you how to navigate these pictures. It’s a logical algebra to help somebody navigate an 8-by-8 grid to read or retrieve hidden messages, pictures and symbols."

He said the first page is basically a lesson in how to read the manuscript.

Rogers speculates that the manuscript was written by three generations of the Longhi Family in Italy, Martino Longhi the Elder (1534-1591), Onorio Longhi (1569-1619) and Martino Longhi the Younger (1602-1660).

"It’s got more than one author. There are multiple hands in this. It was passed from grandfather to father, father to son," Rogers said. "It’s a family owned textbook."

The Longhis were architects and builders who had designed and constructed parts of the Vatican, Rogers said.

He believes the manuscript dates to around 1578 because it makes reference to the 1573 construction of the Villa Mondragone at Frascati, Italy. Rogers said a garden at the villa is a grid that matches the document.

"The garden is the key," Rogers said. "That’s how I figured this out."

Rogers said he believes the book is so secretive because the family used it to protect trade secrets.

"In those days your craft was everything," Rogers said.

He also believes that the family may have been trying to hide certain thoughts from the church, thoughts that could get one killed for disagreeing with religious leaders of the 1500s.

"You’ve got to remember they were burning people at the stake who didn’t quite go along with the church. They’d fry ‘em," Rogers said.

The manuscript was first found in the monastery at Villa Mondragone, Rogers said.

Ownership of the manuscript over the half-millennia is not completely clear, but in 1912, antiquarian book dealer Wilfred M. Voynich purchased the book from the monastery and that is how the manuscript came to bear his name, Rogers said.

He said scholars all over the world have been trying to decipher the manuscript, a process that has become more prominent since it is now available online.

Rogers, who retired in 1991 after 20 years in the U.S. Army, has degrees in ancient history, languages and computer science. He has also done work for the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Yet, when he told his colleagues at FRC East about his work trying to solve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, they looked at him askance.

"They thought I had a screw loose. They said you need to get a life," Rogers said.

Decoding the manuscript is now a big part of Rogers’ life

"All I want to do is decode it so they can take off with it," he said. "I’m just a little computer programmer.

"This is what I’m going to do when I retire, retire. I’ve been in the government for 37 years this is a good way to go out."