World's most mysterious text 'finally cracked': Bristol academic deciphers lost language of 600-year-old Voynich manuscript to reveal astrological sex tips

For 600 years it has steadfastly refused to give up its secrets and has beaten some of the world's most brilliant brains, including Alan Turing.

Experts variously claimed that the Voynich manuscript - known as the 'world's most mysterious text' - contained codes, magic spells, alien messages and even communist propaganda, reports the Daily Mail.

Eventually most agreed that it was either impossible to solve or else written in gibberish as an elaborate practical joke.

But a linguistics expert from the University of Bristol has now cracked it - and it took him just two weeks.

Dr Gerard Cheshire worked out that it was written in a dead language - proto-Romance - and then by studying symbols and their descriptions he deciphered the meaning of the letters and words.

He discovered that the manuscript contains information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings about sex, matters of the female mind and parenting.

It was written in accordance with the Catholic and Roman pagan religious beliefs of the time and has been carbon-dated to around the mid-15th century. 

Dr Cheshire discovered that it was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, who is the great aunt to Catherine of Aragon. 

There are also images of Queen Maria (1401–58) and her court conducting trade negotiations whilst bathing as well as many other images of naked women bathing. 

It demonstrates that the spa lifestyle was highly regarded as a form of physical cleansing and spiritual communion, as well as a general means of relaxation and leisure. 

Also within the manuscript is a foldout illustrative map that helped Dr Cheshire to date and locate the origin of the manuscript. 

The map tells the story of a rescue mission, led by the Queen of Aragon, to save the victims of a volcanic eruption in the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1444 off the western coast of Italy. 

The Voynich manuscript, named after Wilfrid M Voynich, a Polish book dealer who bought the manuscript in 1912, was written in Central Europe in around the 15th century, according to academics.

Its date, origin and language have been debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text featuring botanical and scientific drawings. 

Among those who have famously attempted to crack the code are Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park and the FBI during the Cold War.     

Proto- Romance is ancestral to today's 'Romance' languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. 

Some of the symbols were unfamiliar to scholars studying the text because they have different geographical origins or because they have different variants which indicate particular phonetic accents.  

The language was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government. 

 ''I experienced a series of 'eureka' moments whilst deciphering the code, said Dr Cheshire.

This, he said, was followed by a sense of ''disbelief and excitement'' when he realised the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript.

What it reveals is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it has generated.