Considering The History Of Codes And Ciphers
The origins of codes and ciphers — like the beginnings of language and writing, and my entire Beatles LP collection — are lost in the sands of time. David Kahn, the master historian of codes and ciphers, wrote that the development of secret writing was inevitable in any literate human culture because of “the multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people.”
Then again, legends tell of another source of secret writing. In Jewish tradition, the most ancient book was written by God and delivered to Adam in the Garden of Eden by the angel Raziel (a name that means “secrets of God”). The first published edition of the Book of Raziel the Angel appeared in Amsterdam in 1701. One part of that book illustrates divine alphabets that could be used to encode secrets — divine or otherwise.
Parts of the Jewish Talmud (second century AD) reflect the belief that secret messages were encoded within the text of the Bible. These messages could be decoded according to specific rules, such as gematria (the use of the numerical equivalents of the Hebrew letters, where the first letter has the numerical value “1,” and so on). The use of gematria and other methods to detect secret messages in the Bible appears today in the study of Kabbalah, one approach to Jewish mysticism. (If you’re interested in discovering more about this topic, check out Kabbalah For Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil [Wiley].)
Whether you accept a human or a divine origin of codes and ciphers — or both! — the following sections offer you some tantalizing references to what could be codes and ciphers in ancient literature of a very early date.
Early ciphers
Then again, legends tell of another source of secret writing. In Jewish tradition, the most ancient book was written by God and delivered to Adam in the Garden of Eden by the angel Raziel (a name that means “secrets of God”). The first published edition of the Book of Raziel the Angel appeared in Amsterdam in 1701. One part of that book illustrates divine alphabets that could be used to encode secrets — divine or otherwise.
Parts of the Jewish Talmud (second century AD) reflect the belief that secret messages were encoded within the text of the Bible. These messages could be decoded according to specific rules, such as gematria (the use of the numerical equivalents of the Hebrew letters, where the first letter has the numerical value “1,” and so on). The use of gematria and other methods to detect secret messages in the Bible appears today in the study of Kabbalah, one approach to Jewish mysticism. (If you’re interested in discovering more about this topic, check out Kabbalah For Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil [Wiley].)
Whether you accept a human or a divine origin of codes and ciphers — or both! — the following sections offer you some tantalizing references to what could be codes and ciphers in ancient literature of a very early date.
Early ciphers