The most interesting ciphers of the past: What was the cryptography of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

If in a specially selected book one marks individual letters with a needle - slightly, almost imperceptibly - so that read one after another, they form a certain message, then it will turn out … no, not yet a cipher, but only its predecessor. Such "book" messages were left even before the onset of a new era. However, encrypting the text, that is, turning it into something incomprehensible, also began a very long time ago.

The birth of cryptography

In a sense, the very appearance of writing can be considered the first human experience of using a cipher - after all, the designation of words with handwritten signs, in fact, was encryption. And the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which for Europeans for a long time were the most secret writing, can be attributed to the prototypes of ancient ciphers. And yet, this presentation of information in the form of icons, understandable to a large group of people, is not encryption, but encoding. In the modern world, conventional abbreviations or, for example, emoticons - icons with emotions, play a similar role.

And if the purpose of the constituent document is precisely to conceal information from any possible reader, except for the immediate addressee, then we are talking about creating a cipher. Now the science of ciphers - cryptography - is mainly engaged in the study of electronic methods of data protection, this has become a part of reality both in business and in the private life of a modern person - for example, these are ways to protect bank card information from intruders. But the ancient commanders and rulers, protecting their correspondence from prying eyes, acted, of course, differently.

The origin of cryptography is usually attributed to the 20th century BC, then unusual hieroglyphs that differed from the usual spelling already appeared on ancient Egyptian documents. However, historians call the purpose of such distortion not to confuse the reader, but to make the text more expressive, to make the impression, which, however, prevented ordinary people from perceiving the meaning of what was written.

Much more similar to the code was the recipe for creating glaze for pottery art, written on one clay tablet from Ancient Mesopotamia. The cuneiform text was deliberately confused by the narrator. This experience of protecting trade secrets dates back to about 1500 BC. This appears to be the first example of cryptographic writing.

Naive cryptography and the first primitive encryption devices

Both the rulers of the ancient states and the priests encrypted their messages. The commanders, sending a messenger with a message, handed him a document drawn up according to the rules of secret writing. In the first period of the development of cryptography - up to the onset of the Renaissance - they resorted to the method of transposition, that is, permutation of the letters of the plain text. To read the cipher text, it was required to know the key, that is, the rule by which such a replacement was carried out.

The Jews used - a method of encryption, in which a letter of the alphabet is replaced by another from the same alphabet according to the following rule: the first letter from the beginning - to the first from the end, the second from the beginning - to the second from the end, and so on. Atbash is one of the permutation ciphers. It was used not only in correspondence, examples of the application of this encryption technique can be found in the texts of the Bible. In the Middle Ages, the atbash was adopted by the Templars, who used this cipher until the destruction of the order.

It is known for sure that already in the war of the Athenians and Spartans in the 5th century BC. encryption was applied using. Skitala, or scitala (translated as "rod, staff") was a simple stick of a certain thickness. A parchment tape was wound around it, and the text was written along the axis, turning the skitala when the line ended. When unwinding, the tape was a seemingly chaotic set of letters, and the message could be read only by winding the tape on a wandering of the required size.

Actually, the key to this cipher was information about the rod, which would allow reading what was written. By the way, the ancient Greek sage Aristotle managed to find a way to "break" such a cipher: to do this, it was necessary to wind a tape on a cone-shaped rod: this way it was possible to determine at what diameter wandering from a chaotic sequence of letters words begin to appear. A number of inventions in the field of cryptography are associated with the name the ancient Greek scientist and commander Aeneas Tactic, who in the 4th century invented the first encryption apparatus. It got the name "". The letters of the alphabet were applied to a round plate, and holes were made next to each of them. They encrypted it like this: a thread was threaded through the holes corresponding to the letters. And the recipient had to do the opposite, pulling the thread out of the holes and writing down the letters, which were then read in reverse order.

The disadvantage of this method was that anyone could guess the cipher in whose hands the disk fell. Therefore, soon appeared "". On this device, all the same holes were located, corresponding to the letters, but in a random order. A slot was made at the edge of the ruler. A thread was pulled from the slot to the hole corresponding to the letter, and a knot was made in this place. After that, the thread returned to the slot and again reached for the desired letter in order to measure the place of tying a new knot. The key in this case was the same ruler with information about the location of the letters. But the "bookish" method of secret correspondence invented by the same Aeneas, when little distinguishable marks are made next to the letters on the page, for example, with a needle, is not encryption. In this case, the very fact of the presence of secret information is hidden, which is called steganography.

From ancient encryption to the Middle Ages

The ancient Greek statesman and historian Polybius (II century BC) gave the name to another ancient ciphering technique associated, again, with the rearrangement of letters within the same alphabet., divided into cells, was filled with letters from alpha to omega in order, and in order to encrypt the message, it was necessary to replace the original letter with the one located lower vertically. There were also more complex encryption keys: for example, write down the coordinates of a letter horizontally and vertically, swap these coordinates, and then substitute new letters in accordance with their "addresses." alphabet. The ruler himself used a "step" of three letters.

The very first of the encryption methods in Russia was called. It meant replacing letters with others according to a secret algorithm - a key. The oldest document written in this way dates from 1229 and was written by Metropolitan Cyprian. Another name for the litorea is gibberish, the so-called permutation of consonant letters while preserving vowels. The European method of confusing and distorting the original text, later adopted in Russia, was a bizarre ligature in which individual elements - runes - were depicted together, merging in repeating fragments, and it became impossible to make out the meaning of what was written without knowing the key.

In the Middle Ages, ciphers were used not only by politicians and the military, but also by merchants and ordinary townspeople. Since the VIII century, the Arabs have taken up the theory and practice of cryptography seriously, many books have appeared on encryption and decryption, and a new era has begun in the field of protecting information from accidental access to it by strangers.

And the encryption machine "Enigma" after several centuries became one of the the most expensive artifacts of the Second World War.