Comments on: “Ancient Cryptography” forum…

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:37:31 +0000

Caesar seems out of character.

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 03:16:39 +0000

Follow up to above comment. Since running original comparison of Dora to Standard English letter frequencies, I came upon a freq. table for old English. Turns out that my outlier “n” is the most frequent letter in Dora and old English! I don’t believe Dora qualifies as strictly old English, but likely is somewhere in between. It is interesting, however, that “n” is at the top of both frequencies.(6th in standard English.)

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:59:32 +0000

I looked at the English letters that have been derived from the code. When I ran a comparison with the standard frequency of letters in the English language, the correlation was almost perfect. The only outlier was the letter n, which appears most often in the cipher.(6th in a standard frequency dist.) Otherwise the concurrence suggests that the deciphered clear-text is in fact English. The question of course, is still what the heck does it mean.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 07:59:40 +0000

Alright Nick… solve this for me:

345-180-65-500-40-(73 1/3)-65-80-240-40-15-250-80-125-75-200-(31 1/4)-90?
44-208-64-32-68-64-128-(10 2/3)-68-130-64.
176-96-176-200-552-288-104-504-192, 168-192-64-920-320-(106 2/3)-90-24-304-136-760-320-80-170-24…
[8-4-5]

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:18:49 +0000

Diane: curiously enough, that’s not too far from the method the Knights Templar used to verify the first “cheques” to the Holy Land. In fact, these messages then mutated into simple ciphers split in two… but that’s another story entirely. Note that whereas most (Knights Templar + cipher) stories are simply novelistic fabrications, this one comes from a historian I met who spent a lot of time in the French Templar archives.

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:56:46 +0000

It reminds me of a game we played where you lay one piece of paper over another, the edge of one somewhat lower. Then write the message across the division. You can still read it if you have the top half, but working out the lower can be really difficult, especially if the top sheet is laid at an angle.

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:07:09 +0000

Though many (including me!) have suggested that it might possibly be some kind of enciphered music, on further reflection I really don’t think it is.

Given the symmetrical nature of Elgar’s “E/EE/EEE” cipherbet (formed from 8 x 3 rotated and repeated shapes), I do wonder whether there might be some kind of shape-driven cipher system going on – i.e. something like “rotate each row or column round after every letter”, so that the alphabet repeats every three or eight symbols. Note that there’s a four letter repeat within the message, and overall it looks to be just a little more than just monoalphabetic, so this would be just about the right level of complexity for a self-made cipher system. Basically, might the Dorabella cipher be a kind of rotating pigpen? I haven’t yet checked, but it’s a plausible hypothesis…

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

By: kanumber

kanumber — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:29:11 +0000

my my caesar, what a negative one (-1). ;0)

Nice writeup…

I looked at the Dorabella msg. Any chance it is a snippet of a musical score… a shared melody between the two of them? ….

That seems like a pretty complex puzzle otherwise for a man to expect his young lover to solve….

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:18:05 +0000

True – but perhaps if everyone swore in cipher, the world would be a better place.

Glad you enjoyed the post!

By: rene zandbergen

rene zandbergen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:58:30 +0000

Not a very nice thing to say

Interesting article, though