Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
So who's heard of this? It could almost have been created specifically to puzzle and delight Wikipedia addicts six hundred years after it was written. Maybe it was. Anyway, for those who don't know it's a largeish manuscript created somewhere in Europe in the 15th century (both the vellum and the inks have been reliably dated) and appears to be some sort of herbal or encyclopedia of natural history. Thing is, it's written in a 'script' that resembles no known language and has defeated the efforts of many expert cryptographers to decypher it. It also contains drawings of plants that resemble no known species. Astronomical diagrams include constellations that don't exist, and some drawings have been interpreted as showing galaxies, which weren't discovered until the advent of powerful telescopes centuries later (although this is disputed).
Some people think the book encodes genuine knowledge, or at least information, encrypted in such a clever way that it simply hasn't been decyphered yet. Others think it's a hoax, perhaps by an alchemist and mate of John Dee's called Edward Kelley, who sold the book to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, although this happened over a hundred years after the date given by radiocarbon analysis. Other suspected authors include Francis Bacon. Another hypothesis is that it's a written equivalent to glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues', in other words it meant something to the person who created it but is necessarily meaningless to anyone else, being an artefact of mental illness.
Pretty fucking cool, though.
Some people think the book encodes genuine knowledge, or at least information, encrypted in such a clever way that it simply hasn't been decyphered yet. Others think it's a hoax, perhaps by an alchemist and mate of John Dee's called Edward Kelley, who sold the book to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, although this happened over a hundred years after the date given by radiocarbon analysis. Other suspected authors include Francis Bacon. Another hypothesis is that it's a written equivalent to glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues', in other words it meant something to the person who created it but is necessarily meaningless to anyone else, being an artefact of mental illness.
Pretty fucking cool, though.
Yeah, I heard about that book from the Wiki article on the Manuscript, which I in turn heard about from xkcd.com. I'd love to have a look at the complete PDF 
