The dating fixes the material, not the message
Radiocarbon dating places the parchment—the prepared animal skin used as writing material—in the early fifteenth century. That gives researchers a firm clue about when the pages were made, but it does not identify who wrote them or tell us whether the script encodes an ordinary language, a cipher, or something else. A cipher is a system that disguises a message by replacing or rearranging its letters.
That distinction matters because the manuscript’s marks cannot be tested against a known alphabet or language. A proposed reading may seem to fit a picture or a few repeated words, yet still fail to explain the rest of the text. Without an independent translation, the illustrations cannot reliably serve as a dictionary.
What would count as a convincing solution?
A decipherment would need to work across the manuscript, not just produce a plausible interpretation of one page. It should explain how signs relate to one another, why certain sequences recur, and why their placement changes from line to line. It should also make predictions: a proposed word or pattern ought to appear consistently where the theory says it should.
The pictures offer potential checks, but they are ambiguous. A plant-like drawing, for instance, may invite comparison with known species, yet resemblance alone cannot establish what the accompanying text says. The same caution applies to the manuscript’s bathing scenes and diagrams: they may point toward a subject, but they do not confirm a translation.
The central obstacle is not a shortage of clues; it is the lack of a reliable way to verify what any clue means. Until a reading accounts for the text as a whole and survives those checks, the manuscript’s apparent instructions remain as unreadable as its words.
