Today’s post is about a book with strange illustrations written in an unknown script. This book still waits to be deciphered. And no, I’m not talking about the Voynich manuscript.
Flickr is mainly known as a photo and video hosting website. However, when I recently started a Google search for interesting crypto history material, I found something else on a Flickr site: an encrypted notebook.
This notebook was written by some David Esparza Sasin, who calls it a “document written in Manoco Code invented in 1985”. I will refer to this document as “Manoco manuscript”. It has about 32 pages. As it seems, on the Flickr site some pages are missing and the page order is probably not correct.
As you see, the Manoco Code is an unusual script. The notebook contains pictures that look a little peculiar – something we know from the Voynich manuscript.
I don’t know, whether the content of the Manoco manuscript represents a real encrypted text or whether this notebook contains only meaningless character sequences. If it is a real cryptogram, I suppose that the encryption method used is a simple letter substitution. A more complicated encryption algorithm is hardly practicable for enciphering a whole notebook.
In addition, I don’t know the language of the cleartext (if there is any). The name of the author sounds Spanish, while the Flickr page is written in English. The ciphertext contains words consisting of only one letter, which is consistent with both languages.
On the bottom right of every double page one or two symbols are noted. They look like page numbers to me. It might be a good starting point to analyze these page numbers. Once they are understood, one can look out for numbers in the text (there are many, as it seems) and use them to derive cribs. On the other hand, a frequency analysis might be helpful.
Can somebody solve the Manoco manuscript?
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Further reading: Who can solve this Freemasonic rebus book?
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