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A Syriac Pharmaceutical Dispensatory Encoded in the Voynich Manuscript: Statistical and Philological Evidence from Consonant Skeleton Analysis

Authors: Defibaugh, Brady;

A Syriac Pharmaceutical Dispensatory Encoded in the Voynich Manuscript: Statistical and Philological Evidence from Consonant Skeleton Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents computational evidence that the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408) encodes an Aramaic pharmaceutical text in the Syriac tradition. Using a methodology termed DANI (Drug Appellation Nomenclature Inference), we map the manuscript's EVA-transcribed script to Syriac consonant skeletons and match them against a 1,389-entry lexicon of attested medical vocabulary drawn from Payne Smith, Budge, Löw, Gignoux, Calà and Hawley, Müller-Kessler, and Merx. The pipeline achieves 87.0% corpus coverage at z = 3.83 against 500 random permutations (p < 0.001). Independent visual identification of 111 herbal illustrations produces 14 statistically validated text-image correspondences (Fisher's combined p = 6.66 × 10⁻¹⁶). A vowel disambiguation layer recovers 7,007 tokens into specific Syriac words, including 130 tokens of kuḥlā (collyrium), a pharyngeal-containing word previously invisible in the decoded output. Terminological analysis places the text within the Sergian translation tradition (6th century CE). The author states explicit confidence estimates: 40–50% the underlying tradition is specifically Syriac, 10–15% word-level decode accuracy, 5–10% the full pipeline survives specialist review. This is a preprint; supplementary code and data will be added in a subsequent version.

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