A few days ago, a Norwegian rune specialist deciphered ancient scripts and discovered a medieval analogue of flirty sms. The code "jotunvillur", dating back to the XII-XIII centuries, is known only from nine surviving inscriptions. About him and other complex ciphers later in this article.
Phaistos disc
The oldest printed text on earth has not yet been deciphered. During the excavations of the palace of the Minoan kings in Crete, destroyed by an earthquake in 1500 BC, in one of the hiding places they found a round plate of baked clay the size of a saucer.
On both sides, like a typographic cliché, 242 pictograms are extruded. Archaeologists have counted 45 different characters - from "head with a mohawk" and "head with a tattoo" to "lily", "daisy" and "small ax" (by the way, they are easy to type from any computer keyboard: the creators of Unicode, a universal character set for all kinds of fonts, they found a place there for the ancient Minoan signs).
Since 1908, when the disc fell into the hands of scientists, at least 20 times linguists (or non-professional lovers of everything mysterious) solemnly announced that the code had been broken. Some received instructions for sacrifice (“In silence, put aside the best parts of an animal that has not yet been roasted”), others praised the hero (“Arion, the son of Argos, has no equal”). The situation could be clarified by comparison with another ancient writing system of Crete, the so-called "Linear A". However, it also defies decoding.
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Sculpture Kryptos
In 1990, a curved bronze sheet was installed in the courtyard of the CIA headquarters, on which 1,735 letters and question marks were engraved. Sculptor Jim Sanborn was assisted by cryptographic officer Ed Scheidt. The authors officially announced that the cryptogram contains four encoded messages, which, when combined, make it possible to formulate some kind of riddle.
The first of these messages was read by a certain Californian mathematician in 1999 - it read “Between a light shadow and the absence of light there are shades of illusion” (and the word “illusion” was deliberately misprinted). Two more were deciphered soon after.
A year ago, the US National Security Agency - the very intelligence agency that Edward Snowden had accused of total surveillance of the Internet - announced that their analysts had dealt with three of the sculpture's four ciphers back in 1993. The fourth remains unopened to date.
Enigma machine
British mathematicians in their own way participated in the submarine battles of World War II. Halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, in the town of Milton Keynes, at the height of the war, a sort of institute was set up where Alan Turing and other famous scientists worked to break the code that Germany used to communicate with submarines.
The German ciphers used a typewriter-like apparatus with two keyboards: one ordinary, the other with light bulbs. When the radio operator hit a key with her finger, a light bulb flashed under some other letter. This letter should have been added to the encrypted version of the message.
Not having a single sample of "Enigma" at hand, Turing was able to understand the principle of the machine and build his decoder on the basis of some logical reasoning. The British historian Hinsley even stated that a breakthrough in cryptanalysis brought the end of World War II two, if not four years closer.
Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain also referred to the exceptional role played by the hacking of the Enigma code in the victory over the Nazis when she was posthumously pardoned by the mathematician a few months ago. In 1952, Turing was sentenced to chemical castration for homosexuality, after which the scientist committed suicide.
Voynich manuscript
If ancient manuscripts are usually presented in the form of pood volumes, which are even leafed by two or three, then this, the most famous, at first acquaintance looks utterly ordinary. A shabby book the size of a volume of Dontsova, the cover and title page are blank - not a single indication of how and where she was born. Voynich is not the name of the author, but the surname of the collector who found her in 1912 "in one of the castles in southern Europe" (as he himself writes).
The accompanying letter attached to the manuscript, dated 1666, said that once (probably at the end of the 16th century) Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, bought it for two kilograms of gold. The addressee of the letter was Athanasius Kircher: he, the most famous Jesuit scientist, was asked to help with deciphering the manuscript. 240 pages of parchment are covered with text in an unknown language and illustrated with images of strange herbs and impossible animals.
In the 348 years that have passed since then, science has not made much progress in reading the manuscript - although for cryptologists it has become something of a fortress that can and should be storming without even hoping for success. The least likely hypothesis is that this is a rally. Linguists became convinced that the same statistical regularities are fulfilled for the mysterious language as for the natural ones: possible forgers who decided to jokingly compose 240 pages of deliberate gibberish in the time of Rudolf II could not know such subtleties.
Codex Seraphinianus
Inspired by the Voynich manuscript, in 1981 the Italian designer and architect Luigi Serafini published his album in the same style: 360 pages of text in an unknown language and miniatures in the spirit of a medieval natural science treatise.
Only if the historical manuscript can be suspected of describing some real flora and fauna, then Serafini's horses smoothly turn into caterpillars, and the boy and girl engaged in sex on the storyboard turn into a crocodile. In all interviews, Serafini argues that the text is meaningless, and there is no need to look for logic in the sequence of miniatures - which, of course, only fuels interest in the book among cryptologists enthusiasts.
Jotunvillur
A Norwegian rune specialist has deciphered ancient writing and discovered a medieval counterpart to flirtatious sms, The Guardian claims. The code "jotunvillur", dating back to the XII-XIII centuries, is known only from nine surviving inscriptions.
K. Jonas Nordby, who is writing a dissertation at the University of Oslo, studied a 13th-century stick on which two men - a certain Sigurd and Lavrance - carved their names with ordinary and encrypted runes. This became the clue. It dawned on Nordby that the rune was being replaced by the last sound in its name: for example, the rune "m" (maðr) was denoted by the rune "r". The catch is that many runes end in one sound.
Nordby also noted that the sticks with the ciphered inscriptions carved are "everyday objects." “They were used as a means of communication - something like medieval sms. For the frequent exchange of messages that had only momentary value, - the scientist explained. "Perhaps it was a note to wives or a record of commercial transactions."
In most cases, the inscriptions on the sticks are unencrypted. But there are also interesting ciphers: “A simple code was found on a stick from Sweden, where the runes are designated by numbers. The text is believed to read: "Kiss me." Nordby quoted another inscription from the Orkney Islands: "These runes were written by the most skilled rune writer west of the sea." “He's clearly showing off,” the scientist commented.
According to Nordby, the ciphers did not serve as cryptography, but as a kind of game that helped to master the runic writing.