drawings of unidentified plants,heavenly bodies,and bathing women at first led some people to surmise that it was the work of a medieval herbalist - or even an alchemist.More serious inspection,though, suggested that the hand-lettered text seemed to be written in an unknown script and unknownlanguage.The20 to30 distinct glyphs, or characters,certainly resembled 15th-century European letters but had no discernible meaning in any European tongue.