The Borg Cipher
A deciphered book written in the 17th century about how to treat symptoms and diseases. A glass of red wine of high quality was part in many, albeit oftentimes bizarre, and rather painful treatments.
The Borg cipher is a 408 pages hand-written manuscript, probably from the 17th century. The manuscript is located at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and called MSS-Borg.lat.898.
The cipher was decoded by Nada ALdarrab, Kevin Knight and Beáta Megyesi.
The cipher consists of 34 different characters, comprising of graphic signs and Roman letters, combined with some diacritics. Catchwords used for page numbering are often written at the bottom of left–hand pages. The entire manuscript is encoded with the exception of the first and last two pages, and some headings in Latin in the first part of the manuscript.
The book is transcribed and deciphered and brought to light a text in Latin (and partly Italian) describing how to treat various kinds of symptoms and diseases and reveals other pharmaceptic knowledge or secrets of that time.
Part of the DECODE project
The decipherment of the Borg cipher was part of the DECODE project aiming at the collection and decipherment of historical ciphers in early modern times in Europe.
Download
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Text in transcription: txt (162 Kb)
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(Automatically) deciphered Latin text: (165 Kb)
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Corrected Latin text with translation: txt (372 Kb)
[by Urban Örneholm]
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English translation (187 Kb)
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Comments to the english translation (322 Kb)
[by Urban Örneholm] -
Borg - Key.png (45 Kb)
Publications
Nada Aldarrab, (2017) Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts. Master's Thesis, University of Southern California,
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Delio Proverbio at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana who directed our attention to the encoded manuscript, Kajsa Johansson for helping us transcribing parts of the manuscript, Urban Örneholm for the correction of the automatically deciphered Latin text and for the English translation, Ambjörn Sjörs for the interpretation of the first page, and Hans Helander for advice concerning the Latin text.
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, grant E0067801 DECODE: Automatic decryption of historical manuscripts.
Project information
Project period: 2016
Participants: Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
Project members: Nada Aldarrab and Kevin Knight, Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) and Beáta Megyesi, Dept. of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University.
Project status: Finished
Contact
Last updated: November 24, 2023
Source: Institutionen för lingvistik