Roughly 240 pages of vellum in an unknown script that nobody has ever demonstrably read, held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since 1969 as MS 408. Radiocarbon work at the University of Arizona in 2009 dated the parchment to between 1404 and 1438, so the object is genuinely early fifteenth century whatever the text is. It falls into six sections by their illustrations: plants, circular astronomical diagrams with zodiac figures, women bathing in pools and channels, obscure cosmological discs, plant parts with jars, and a final section of text marked with stars. At least fourteen folios are missing. Professional cryptographers from both world wars have had a go at it and no proposed solution has ever been independently verified. The library has digitised the whole thing, so you can read what nobody can read from anywhere.
Beinecke Library, Yale, New Haven, Connecticut
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