Despite the development of decryption technologies, which has accelerated with the advent of the Internet, humanity continues to puzzle over unsolved messages. The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph has compiled a list of 10 encrypted messages, the content of which has not yet been disclosed, despite the breakthrough computer technology.
1. The most important encrypted message of the ancient culture of the island of Crete was the Phaistos disc, a clay product found in the city of Phaistos in 1903. Both sides are covered with hieroglyphs in a spiral pattern. Experts were able to distinguish 45 types of signs, but only a few of them were identified as hieroglyphs that were used in the pre-palace period of the ancient history of Crete.
2. Linear writing. It was also found in Crete and named after the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. In 1952, Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, which was used to encipher the Mycenaean language, the oldest known variant of Greek. But Linear A was only partially solved, while the uncovered fragments were written in some language unknown to science, not associated with any of the known languages.
3. Kryptos is a sculpture that the American sculptor James Sanborn installed at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in 1990. The encrypted message inscribed on it still cannot be solved (Kryptos is shown in the figure).
4. A cipher inscribed on a Chinese gold bar. Seven gold bars were allegedly issued to General Wang in Shanghai in 1933. They contain pictures, Chinese letters and some kind of encrypted messages, including in Latin letters. They may contain certificates of authenticity for the metal issued by one of the US banks. The content of Chinese characters indicates that the value of the gold bars exceeds $ 300 million.
5. Bale Cryptograms - Three encrypted messages that are believed to contain information about the whereabouts of a treasure of two vans of gold, silver and precious stones, buried in the 1820s at Lynchburg, in Bedford County, Virginia, by a party of gold prospectors led by Thomas Jefferson Bale. The price of the hitherto not found treasure in terms of modern money should be about $ 30 million. The mystery of cryptograms has not yet been solved, in particular, the question of the real existence of the treasure remains controversial. One of the messages is decoded - it describes the treasure itself and gives general instructions on its location. The remaining unopened letters may contain the exact place of the bookmark and a list of the owners of the treasure.
6. The Voynich manuscript, which is often called the most mysterious book in the world. The manuscript uses a unique alphabet, about 250 pages and drawings depicting unknown flowers, naked nymphs and astrological symbols. It first appeared at the end of the 16th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II bought it in Prague from an unknown merchant for 600 ducats (about 3.5 kg of gold, today more than 50 thousand dollars). From Rudolf II, the book passed to nobles and scientists, and at the end of the 17th century it disappeared.
The manuscript reappeared around 1912 when it was bought by the American bookseller Wilfried Voynich. After his death, the manuscript was donated to Yale University. British scholar Gordon Rugg believes the book is a clever hoax.
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The text has features that are not characteristic of any of the languages. On the other hand, some features, for example, the length of words, the way letters and syllables are connected, are similar to those existing in real languages. “Many people think that this is all too complicated to be hoaxed, it would take years for some crazy alchemist to build such a system,” says Rugg.
However, Rugg shows that this complexity could have been easily achieved using a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan grid.
In this symbol table, words are created by moving a card with holes cut in it. Thanks to the spaces left in the table, the words are of different lengths. By imposing such grids on the syllable table of the manuscript, Rugg created a language that has many, if not all, of the manuscript language features. According to him, it would take three months to create the entire book.
7. The Dorabella code, compiled in 1897 by the British composer Sir Edward William Elgar. In encrypted form, he sent a letter to the city of Wolverhampton to his friend Dora Penny, 22-year-old daughter of Alfred Penny, rector of St. Peter's Cathedral. This cipher remains unsolved.
8. Until recently, there was also a chaocipher in the list, which could not be revealed during the life of its creator. The code was invented by John F. Byrne in 1918, and for almost 40 years tried unsuccessfully to interest the US authorities in it. The inventor offered a monetary reward to anyone who could reveal his code, but as a result no one asked for it. But in May 2010, Byrn's family members donated all of his remaining documents to the National Museum of Cryptography in Maryland, leading to the disclosure of the algorithm.
9. D'Agapeyeff cipher. In 1939, Russian-born British cartographer Alexander D'Agapeyeff published a book on the basics of cryptography, Codes and Ciphers, in the first edition of which he cited a cipher of his own invention. This code was not included in subsequent editions. Subsequently, D'Agapeyeff admitted that he had forgotten the algorithm for breaking this cipher. It is suspected that the failures that befell everyone who tried to decipher his work was caused by the fact that the author made mistakes when encrypting the text. But in our time, there is a hope that the cipher will be able to be discovered using modern methods - for example, a genetic algorithm.
10. Taman Shud On December 1, 1948, on the Australian coast in Somerton, near Adelaide, the dead body of a man was found, dressed in a sweater and coat, despite the typical hot day for the Australian climate. No documents were found with him. Attempts to compare the prints of his teeth and fingers with the available data on living people also did not lead to anything. The pathological examination revealed an unnatural rush of blood, which was filled, in particular, his abdominal cavity, as well as an increase in internal organs, but no foreign substances were found in his body.
At the railway station at the same time they found a suitcase that could belong to the deceased. The suitcase contained trousers with a secret pocket, in which they found a piece of paper torn from a book with the words Taman Shud printed on it. The investigation established that a piece of paper was torn from a very rare copy of the Rubai collection of the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam. The book itself was found in the back seat of a car, abandoned unlocked. On the back cover of the book were five lines scribbled in all caps, a message that was never understood. To this day, this story remains one of Australia's most mysterious mysteries.