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

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.