Psst!

Can you keep a secret?

If not, can I still send a message with you?

My secret? I'm writing this at 1:30 A.M., so I'm going to tell you something about one of my favorite topics.

Steganography began among the ancients, from carving in a tablet before coating it with wax (the wax being the typical writing medium) to tattooing a message on a slave's head. (Thank you, Herodotus. :) Perhaps then the few uses of steganography and even cryptography in political matters by Caesar could be covered, as a cipher technique was even named after him, but that's about as interesting as cryptography gets until after the Renaissance...in Western culture.

As we step into Arabic culture, the colors and flavors explode around 800 A.D. You see, they adored the Koran (an orthographic choice I will stick to for this post). (Yes, they still do.) This led scholars and thinkers to delve deeply into the text and seek for deeper religious meaning in the uses of letters, their frequencies, parallel usages, and other quirks of the text. Early linguistic approaches to the text were explored, and were later tentatively generalized to common Arabic. Tables indicating how often both individual letters and pairs of letters (digraphs) occurred in the Koran were developed, and it was realized that the ciphers of the day were all readily broken down. A text whose name I do not recall presently was written detailing the theoretical underpinnings and practical considerations of codebreaking (specifically frequency analysis), and is still a good reference on the technique. This was around 1200 A.D., as I recall (the text discussing this is safely nestled in the university library, where I am not). Other cryptographic examples can be found demonstrating their sophistication. This was a very Sophist form of knowledge for them, and was discussed in, I suspect, the 'father tongue' among scholars.

enciphered letters (Simon Singh's Black Chamber

Sadly, the West did not acquire this skill from their sophisticated neighbors. As late as the 1600s (I think), a man would boast that he had, in only three days, broken a cipher that the Muslim cryptographers would have spent ten minutes on! It seems to me that during the dark ages, scholarly pursuits were not seen as desirable. Furthermore, the general European approach was to treat code breaking as a sort of witchcraft, so the few that were able to do it were isolated. As written communication increased, however, political leaders began to recognize its power as an intelligence gathering system. Some countries, notably Austria, realized that it was a skill much like any other and set up a system by which talented students could be recognized and tested as potential codebreakers. Note here that, due to "national security" concerns, this knowledge was not made public! Those who proved talented were brought into the circle of skilled codebreakers and learned the art from those who knew. Codification of the topic would have facilitated its dissemination, so it was passed on by word of mouth. Thus, while feared in Europe as an evil mantic technique, later became a horizontal Sophic knowledge (that admits the value and even need for intuition), albeit with a person-to-person mother-tongue preservation technique.


For further reading, I highly suggest The Codebreakers by David Kahn (Z103.K28) and The Code Book by Simon Singh (Code Book web resources).