I Googled “cryptology” instead of “cryptography” because I
don’t know what I’m doing any more.
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| There seems to be some confusion in terms, anyway. |
1) The oldest known attempt at encryption dates back to the
kingdom of Egypt, about two
thousand years before Christ. The ciphers are found on the tomb of
Khnumhotep II. They may have been created as a joke, or in an attempt to
construct an air of mystery around the tomb itself.
2) By 500 years before Christ, the ancient Greeks of Sparta had
developed a device called a scytale,
which they used to exchange encrypted messages. Both the sender of the coded
message and its recipient had to have one. The scytale consisted of a stick
around which a strip of leather or parchment was wound. The sender wrote his
message on the wound-up paper, so that when the strip was unwound, it wouldn’t
make sense. The receiver had to re-wrap the strip around his own scytale,
which had to be of the exact same size and length as the other guy's, in order to decode it.
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| That's the Roman alphabet! I call shenanigans! |
3) The next big breakthrough in encryption came
in the 9th century, from Arab mathematician Al-Kindi. His book, On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages,
introduced the field of cryptanalysis,
or code-breaking. He introduced code-breaking techniques for substitution
ciphers using single and multiple alphabets, as well as introducing different
types of encryption and discussing the Arabic language’s encryption potential. Other
scholars of the medieval Muslim world produced work on cryptography and frequency analysis,
the study of the frequency of letters and groups of letters in a cipher, but
much of it has been lost.
4) In Europe, Leon Battista Alberti
was, in the year 1467, “inventing” the polyalphabetic cipher,
a substitution cipher that uses multiple alphabets. I’m using quotation marks
(which I privately refer to as “those little ears”) because, as you may have
noticed, our Arab mathematician Al-Kindi included some discussion of these in
his own treatise of 800 AD. Of course, 15th century Europeans were
fresh out of the Crusades, and maybe even still crusading a little bit
from time to time, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Alberti got the
credit for devising the first polyalphabetic cipher, and earned himself the
title of “father of Western cryptology.”
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| "Father of lookin' freakin' creepy," if you ask me. |
5) One of history’s most inscrutable manuscripts, the Voynich manuscript,
is believed to be a complicated cipher. It dates from the first part of the 15th
century, and is likely Italian in origin. It takes its current name from
Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who acquired it in 1912. Since 1969, the book
has resided in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University.
Two hundred and forty pages of the Voynich manuscript have
survived to the modern day, although there are clearly some pages missing. Evidence
suggests that the original manuscript had about 272 pages, and that they were
probably in a different order. The manuscript includes numerous illustrations
of plants, making it resemble a medieval treatise on the medicinal uses of
herbs. However, none of the plants pictured in the manuscript are known to exist.
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| Not that you can tell because it looks like they were drawn by a toddler. |
The text of the manuscript is completely incomprehensible,
despite efforts by some of the world’s best codebreakers, including some who served the Americans and British during both World Wars. The
text was written from left to right, and uses an alphabet of 20 to 30 commonly
repeated glyphs, with a few rarer ones sprinkled throughout the manuscript. The
glyphs appear to be arranged into words, most of which are no longer than ten
characters, and few of which are shorter than three characters. The text
exhibits the characteristics of a language that evolved naturally. The strange
alphabet resembles the Greek, Cyrillic or Latin alphabets, in that the
characters are always written in the same fashion no matter where they appear
in the “word.” In some places, the same “word” appears two or three times in a
row. The symbols appear similar to the commonly used alphabets of contemporary
Europe, but the words make no sense in any of those languages. The smooth flow
of the handwritten text suggests that its author was familiar with writing in this language, or that the manuscript was copied from another source.
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| Also, this. |
The earliest known owner of the book was Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor,
who lived from 1552 to 1612. Rudolf passed the book to Jacobus
Sinapius, head of the imperial botanical gardens. It then found its way
into the possession of alchemist Georg Baresch, who had no
idea what it meant, but refused to surrender it to scholar Athanasius Kircher,
who got it anyway after Georg’s death. After Athanasius’s death, the book
remained with his things at the Collegio Romano until 1912, when the
university, short on funds, decided to sell the manuscript, along with others,
to Voynich. No one, of course, knows who created the manuscript, although one
theory speculates that the book was a hoax created to
swindle the aforementioned Emperor Rudolf out of the equivalent of what
would today be $80, 831.20 US.
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| More than a hundred years before said Emperor's birth. Sure. |
