Welcome to Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries, a blog devoted to unsolved historical code/cipher mysteries. It also looks sideways to other (perhaps less obvious) places where these appear - books, films, TV, radio, music, opera, sculpture, design, metalworking, eBay scams, etc.
For centuries, novelists have used unbroken ciphertexts as conspiratorial plot devices: yet the actual theories surrounding such cipher mysteries are, bizarrely, frequently more fantastical than any fiction.
Arguably the biggest cipher mystery ever is The Voynich Manuscript - here's a link to probably the best online introduction to it. Or alternatively (if, say, you're a bit short of time), here's how to become a world-class Voynich Manuscript Expert in a mere five minutes.
Another well-known (if somewhat smaller) cipher mystery is The Dorabella Cipher: here's a very straightforward introduction to that.
If you landed here by accident, perhaps some entertaining general blog posts might be what you'd like: the Adrenalini Brothers cipher, a sexy enciphered Jewish limerick, Hans Carvel retold as a txt msg.
Finally, if you're just interested in historical cipher mysteries in general, this is the site for you! Probably the best way to get the full benefit is to subscribe by email (yes, it's completely free)- just enter your email address in the box at the top right and click on the "Subscribe" button below it. Simple! Posts are also carefully categorised, so feel free to mooch around using the Post Categories widget-thing on the top left.
PS: for more about this site, click here.
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 9th, 2010 - 1 comment.
I love this picture from the Porco Cane blog:-
During 1992 restoration work on the Cathedral of Salamanca, this astronaut ensnared by vines was added by Jeronimo Garcia, along with "a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish", all approved by the appropriate committee etc. Perhaps ...
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 6th, 2010 - 6 comments.
Even when I've shown the VMs' marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there's a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable.
But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other ...
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 5th, 2010 - 2 comments.
Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript's plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?
Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there's a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief ...
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 4th, 2010.
Just as it says on the tin title, here are some nice manuscript-related links for you. :-)
First off, I didn't know until very recently that there was a Wikipedia entry on manuscript culture, which contains all kinds of manuscript-related bits and pieces (it puts the decline in trade for parchminers circa 1500, for example). However, I ...
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 2nd, 2010 - 9 comments.
Following on from yesterday's post on Elmar's marginalia PDF, I've once again been looking really closely at the Voynich marginalia. I'm using the modern kind of fuzzily-overlapping codicology / palaeography / linguistic methodology that sometimes gets mentioned online (but which may be more to do with university administrators' desire to collapse three history lecturing posts into one) to try to model the ...
Posted by nickpelling on Mar 1st, 2010 - 10 comments.
Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his "Voynich Thoughts" website of the Voynich Manuscript's teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger's notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I'm sure you want ...
Posted by nickpelling on Feb 27th, 2010 - 15 comments.
For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs' confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I've done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it's now interesting to hear that René ...
Posted by nickpelling on Feb 25th, 2010 - 10 comments.
This week is "Shakespeare Week" at my son's school: his year have been allocated A Midsummer Night's Dream, and so get to do their lessons in costume for a day. All of which yielded an ideal family opportunity to break out one of those tediously aspirational The-Bard-For-Kidz boxed sets and run through a heavily abridged version with him to see which ...
Posted by nickpelling on Feb 24th, 2010 - 4 comments.
Art historians have long debated whether or not dissatisfied architect Antonio Averlino made the trip from Italy to Constantinople in 1465: one of the key pieces of evidence supporting the notion is the letter of recommendation written in Greek by Averlino's old friend Filelfo (the humanist writer and Hellenophile) and addressed to George Amirutzes (Mehmed II's personal tutor).
This is one of those things ...
Posted by nickpelling on Feb 23rd, 2010 - 17 comments.
I remember when I first saw the "Roger Bacon Manuscript": Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 - my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the ...
