After many years of searching, I finally have a viable excuse reason to go to Belgium that doesn’t involve chocolate, waffles, mussels, chips, or beer. 🙂 And it’s all thanks to the National Security Agency…

I should explain. A few weeks ago, the NSA very generously declassified back issues of its in-house journal “Cryptolog” from August 1974 to Summer 1997 (though admittedly quite heavily redacted in places). Hence I’ve started working my way through them, looking (unsurprisingly) for any Cipher Mysteries stories that haven’t otherwise come to my attention. (Note that there are two Voynich-related snippets listed in the overall index, but these contain nothing obviously new or particularly surprising).

Hence the September 1974 issue of Cryptolog is where I found this particular story. It’s about a church in the Belgian town of Moustier which has a pair of rather curious cryptograms, which Professor Jean Connart (who was writing a history of Moustier), “has been trying since 1961 to discover the meaning” of. Without success, of course.

The first cryptogram is on the church’s St Martin’s Altar (photo by Koen Van de moortel)…

Moustier Church, St Martin's Altar

…and the second is on its Virgin’s Altar (photo also by Koen Van de moortel, but scaled up and sharpened by me)…

Moustier Church, Virgin's Altar

What’s nice is that the Cryptolog pages answer many of the questions you’d have asked about Moustier Church if you’d had the chance:

According to parish records, the church at Moustier was in such dilapidated condition about 1836 that repairs were needed to/prevent total ruin of the building. In addition, the winds of November 1836 had taken off part of the roof. In June 1838, some work was undertaken “in accordance with the plans of Philibert Pluvinage and Pierre Joseph Lemaitre. “A stonemason (un tailleur de pierre) received board and lodging for 18 days.” (Italics Prof. Connart’s)

In spite of these repairs, the church was (c.1840?) in such poor condition that part of it collapsed when the roof was raised. The contractors had to rebuild the choir and the side chapels (where the altars are) from the ground up.

There is a published report (Moulart, Basecles; Esquisse religieuse) that the ancient altar of St. Martin was sold or offered for sale at Basecles in 1843. Basecles, a Belgian town near the French border, contains the Church of St. Martin which dates from 1779 and is considered the best product of the Tournai School. Does the Moustier St. Martin’s altar come from Basecles? Were both it and the Virgin’s altar constructed in l843? Or does only the stonecutting date from that time? Answers to these questions could have a bearing on the date of the Moustier cryptograms and their underlying message.

Given that we have reasonable photos of these cryptograms (rather than the hand-drawn monochrome copies that appear in the Cryptolog pages) to work with, we’re arguably at an advantage over the NSA right from the start. And from that I can see that the letter carving is really rather… variable. The height of each row of letters seems inconsistent, with the vertical bars on the U in “LUBΓPNID” plainly different lengths; each row is 7, 8 or 9 characters long; there seems to be no obvious rationale as to whether individual characters have serifs or not; while some characters appear to be formed of merged pairs of letters, possibly accidentally (copying ciphers onto paper is hard, let alone onto stone) or deliberately (to squeeze them into a rectangle), it’s hard to tell.

Yet from the distinctive ‘R’ shape, and the closeness of the match between the materials and framing motif, I think it very likely that the two were carved by the same person at basically the same time.

If you want to take this on, here are my (provisional) transcriptions. I’ve transcribed the “Γ” character as ‘F’, the “Λ” character as “^”, and the composite “Γ-merged-with-L” character as “[“. And being in Belgium, you’ve got Flemish, French, German, and Latin (at least) to choose from as possible plaintext languages. Just be grateful that the dating seems to rule out Klingon. 😉

Moustier Church, St Martin’s Altar cryptogram

J N L K B F P R
V M G H W H[
Q L S B N F HP
M G [ K H V R
^ L R N F S X V

P F V B L P M R
R A [ G K T D
B N D F J V R W
L U B F P N I D
C [ T R ^ Q M

Moustier Church, Virgin’s Altar cryptogram

L F E G K R V Q
Y P Z H N R L B D
M F ^ N V D [
N ^ P V J H M ^
L F N ^ B K P

N C L X B P D W
R N [ C H Z R P
M D X R ^ P L N
H F ^ L D N X W
E N L V N D ^ P N

As far as the transcription goes, I’m far from sure about what’s going on here. I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the mystery might arise from a laziness in the carver, because “E” only appears in the Virgin’s Altar, while “[” appears twice as much in St Martin’s Altar. That is, might “[” simply be a lazy ‘E’, and “^” a lazy “A”? Or might “[” instead be a merged “L + Γ” pair?

As far as letter frequencies go (~27 unique shapes used):
16: N
12: P / L / R
10: F / ^ (note that I included the one instance of ‘A’ in the count for ‘^’)
9: V / D
8: B / H
7: M
6: [
5: K
4: W / X / G
3: J / C/ Q
2: Z / S / T/ E
1: I / Y / U

As far as the cryptanalysis goes, there are quite a few patterns:
3-grams: BFP (2 instances, both in the St Martin’s Altar cryptogram)
2-grams: R^ (4 instances), ^P, PN, ^L, PM (3 instances), plus 14 other 2-grams that repeat once.

PS: Koen Van de moortel describes the cryptograms as a “table with 700 year old secret code, referred to in the “Centuries” from Yves de Lessines, stolen and published by Nostradamus“. Basically, the story there is about a 14th century Cistercian monk called Yves de Lessines, whose book “Les Centuries” Rudy Cambier (of the University of Liège) recently claimed was reused by Nostradamus for his Prophecies. Cambier also claims in his book that “Les Centuries” also describes where the Knights Templar hid their treasure. Just so you know!

41 thoughts on “The Moustier Cryptograms…

  1. Tricia on April 2, 2013 at 2:22 pm said:

    Handy pair of blanks for model typefaces?

    Read your heading first as ‘Mousier cryptograms’ – ah, that’s me, says I. 🙂

  2. Why are the names Pluvinage and Lemaitre so darn familiar????

  3. oh heck. Lemaitre proposed big bang theory. A little later than the one here.

  4. SirHubert on April 3, 2013 at 9:06 am said:

    It’s The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, isn’t it? Hopefully without anything nasty in the well…

    Wouldn’t you think that the church authorities or local dignitaries must have known what these inscriptions meant at the time? It seems unlikely that a priest would have let someone carve an unknown inscription on an altar, when secret alphabets and mysterious inscriptions could say anything and might even have occultic significance.

    So what kind of inscriptions would be added to an altar?

    I see that previous researchers have suggested that it could be a list of donors to the church or people who helped with the rebuilding. Possible, but if so then they’re listed very cryptically (most donors prefer slightly less anonymity than that) and an altar seems a curious place to acknowledge them.

    A more likely possibility, in my opinion, might be an appropriate text either for the rebuilding of a church or for the particular saint honoured on each altar. Why encipher it? Probably not to make it impossible to read, but to make regular visitors and worshippers look at a familiar text afresh.

    The two texts are almost exactly the same length, with that on the Virgin’s altar four letters longer. There are plenty of Latin hymns whose verses each have four lines of eight syllables. Thirty-two syllables would fit nicely with the lengths of the two texts, allowing for two or three letters per syllable. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other candidates, such as the following antiphon from the Vespers of Feast of St Martin:

    O virum ineffabilem nec labore victum nec morte vincendum qui nec mori timuit nec vivere recusavit.

    This has about 84 characters as given here (counting manually while on the train), although there seem to be slightly different versions of the text and there is also the possibility of abbreviations and contractions…

    Are there any good reasons for thinking that this isn’t just a monoalphabetic substitution cipher of some kind? The letter frequencies look OK for a Western language, and there are plenty of repetitions and patterns. Clearly there were far more sophisticated systems being used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but how likely is it that we would find these being deployed on a Belgian altar?

    One final point which may conceivably be significant – the first sixteen letters of the first inscription are all different with no repetition until the second ‘L’ at position 17. If I were trying to come up with an English word or phrase with these characteristics then I think I’d be struggling. Unless the inscription is really about speedy foxes leaping over indolent canines…

  5. SirHubert: just as puzzling is the fact that the text apparently makes use of 27 different cipher shapes, which arguably also points to velocitous vulpines and languid hounds…

  6. Diane on April 4, 2013 at 8:14 am said:

    How about litanies, or liturgical calendar in shorthand. The Γ could refer to a major feria or to ‘the greater feast’ of one or another.

    Another thought – perhaps a way to commemorate workers who were beneath the roof when it caved in, without turning altar or chapel into funerary monuments.

    Another possibility is that if there were relics in the altars as was usual for the main altar, these might be a way to record them – that’s less likely than a record of donors, of course.

    Strange that no-one in the parish knows. This is the sort of thing explained to each generation in turn by parents.

    D.

  7. Diane on April 5, 2013 at 2:35 am said:

    *walls* caved

  8. Poul Gjol on April 5, 2013 at 7:58 am said:

    Dont you think we are back to the Bacon sypher same method used in first Shakespeare edition ? The time it was made fits.

  9. SirHubert on April 5, 2013 at 8:02 am said:

    A more boring suggestion would be that someone has tried to reproduce poorly-preserved inscriptions on the old altars and misunderstood them. But I think we have a little way to go before settling for something as defeatist as that 🙂

  10. Poul: I’m currently reading Rudy Cambier’s book, and it does indeed bear some of the hallmarks of Baconian “enigmatology” (to use David Kahn’s word). Basically, Yves de Lessines is to Nostradamus as Bacon is to Shakespeare – the former presumed to be the secret author behind the latter. 🙂

  11. Diane on April 5, 2013 at 9:44 am said:

    I really think it must have something to do with religious practices to be maintained where it is. The most likely things, I should think, would be names: names in a litany, of prayers to be said, of the events attached to the rosary, or names of psalms (which went by first words, not numbers in earlier times), or names of donors whom the parish had promised to remember in perpetuity.

    Something of that sort would be in keeping, I’d think.

    Speaking of names:
    the line written second from last, on the right-hand stone for St.Martin’s altar reads rather like “Liutprand”.

    A possibility.

  12. Hi Nick! Here’s my reading of the St. Martin’s Altar:

    J N L K B F P R
    V M G H W H[ (an E ligatured with [)
    Q L S B N F HP
    M G [ K H V R
    ^ L R N F S X V

    P F V B L P M R
    R A [ G K T D
    B N D F J V R W
    L U B F P N ([ D ligatured)
    C [ T R ^ Q M

    Yes, several possibilities for the underlying languages, but local practices ought to give insight on that.

    Cheers,
    Dennis

  13. SirHubert on April 10, 2013 at 8:35 am said:

    Dennis: thank you – I think this gives two corrections: the end of line 3 reads FHP, not FHE, and the end of line 9 reads PNED, not PNID.

  14. SirHubert on April 16, 2013 at 9:12 am said:

    Here’s a (reasonably accurate) table showing the letter frequencies for each cryptogram (St Martin / Virgin):

    A 3 / 7
    B 5 / 3
    C 1 / 2
    D 3 / 6
    E 4 / 4
    F 6 / 4
    G 3 / 1
    H 4 / 4
    J 2 / 1
    K 3 / 2
    L 6 / 6
    M 4 / 3
    N 5 / 11
    P 5 / 7
    Q 2 / 1
    R 7 / 5
    S 2 / 0
    T 2 / 0
    U 1 / 0
    V 5 / 4
    W 2 / 2
    X 1 / 3
    Y 0 / 1
    Z 0 / 2

    In virtually all cases the frequencies are very similar in both, and I think it’s safe to assume that the same cipher was used in each case. The main exceptions are ciphertext A (3 / 7) and especially ciphertext N (5 / 11). If these were Latin texts relating to the respective saints honoured on each altar, it would be tempting to suggest that A=’s’ (masculine terminations such as -us, -os and -is) and N=’a’ (feminine terminations in -a, -as, -ae etc).

    Could someone more knowledgeable than me tell me whether the following observations seem fair:

    – the letter frequencies are compatible with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in a European language such as French or Latin;
    – the number of repeated bi- and trigrams is also consistent with a substitution cipher without additional transposition.

    Finally, is there any software that can analyse a text for patterns such as bigrams and also do letter counts? I could probably have written a program to do this for a BBC Micro in the 1980s but that skill has gradually faded and been replaced by advanced baby-changing techniques…

  15. SirHubert on May 2, 2013 at 11:05 am said:

    Stupid, sorry – frequencies for ciphertext A would have to be 7/3 in that case, not 3/7. N=’a’ still seems fair, though?

  16. Pingback: Top-25 der ungelösten Verschlüsselungen – Platz 23: Die Altarinschriften von Moustier – Klausis Krypto Kolumne

  17. Sorry about my poor English, but…

    Γ – gamma, letter of the Greek alphabet.
    Γ – G letter of Russian alphabet (or other Slavic languages)

    Λ – lambda, letter of the Greek alphabet
    Λ – L letter of Russian alphabet (or other Slavic languages)

    But in that case there are two types of “L”…Latin L and Greek/Slavic Λ (el).

    What it means? It could be that someone tried to reproduce poorly-preserved inscriptions ( as told Sir Hubert) or overwrite or try to hide old text.

    I think that there are more than one carving master too! Just look at St Martin’s Altar. The carving style of letters are different:
    – there is difference between carving style of first K and other Ks,
    – there are two carving styles of N (some of them are missing little lines on top and bottom of the letter)
    – have a look at left side`s W and right side`s W.

    Obviously there are some very beautifully and professionally made letters (first three on left side) and some of them are carved very amateurishly (last two rows on both sides).

    The sign “[” is overwrite Γ (Gamma or Russian G) to make it look like Latin L.

    🙂

  18. SirHubert on September 14, 2013 at 2:25 pm said:

    Lelde: an alternative would be that the Γ is intended to be a Latin ‘F’, and the square C is meant to be a Latin I with serifs, as these characters are otherwise not found.

    But the choice of letters used for the ciphertext is certainly unusual, with different characters for U and V, and lots of Ks and Ws. And the Cryptologia article suggested that the non-Latin letters might be used for double-letters or similar?

  19. SirHubert on September 14, 2013 at 11:08 pm said:

    A couple more observations:

    Firstly, contra my suggestions above, I’m now pretty sure that this isn’t a straightforward monoalphabetic substitution cipher (which should have been obvious, given that the kind of people who read Cryptologia have already looked at this, but it pays to assume nothing).

    Secondly, while there is a preference for lines of about eight characters, line length isn’t uniform. Nor are there the same number of characters in the lines on the corresponding halves of each altar, so if we’re meant to pair letters in some way it’s not obvious how. The total number of characters in the left and right panels is identical on St Martin and out by one on the Virgin’s Altar, but this needn’t indicate any more than an equal division of the ciphertext into two halves for aesthetic reasons.
    Thirdly, some of the letter-forms do look to be either Greek or Cyrillic, although the Γ is only a mid-stroke away from an F and the Λ is also a mid-stroke away from an A. The images have been enhanced (by Nick?) and it’s difficult to tell quite what’s going on.
    Fourthly, the ciphertext does seem to use exactly 26 different letters (the stray ‘I’ identified by Nick looks to be another ‘[‘ ligated to the following letter). I’d welcome thoughts on the significance of this. Mediaeval Latin just about stretched to 26 letter-forms but u/v and i/j were often interchangeable and K and Y aren’t usual. For French, K, Y and Z each come in at 0.2% in letter frequency charts, so what are the chances of finding all three in a 160-character text? Of course, the underlying language may be neither, but I would still suggest that using all 26 letters of the alphabet in such a short message is problematic. (This post is far longer than the cryptograms and I’ve not used Z in context yet). So it’s more plausible, perhaps, that the ciphertext has been derived from some kind of table which uses all 26 theoretical letters in the Latin alphabet.
    But somehow using Vigenere, le chiffre undechiffrable, in this context doesn’t feel quite right. Why place the cryptograms so prominently for all to see if you’re deliberately using a method of encryption which you believe to be unbreakable? Wouldn’t you pick a system which would be challenging but not impossible? Or is this misunderstanding the point of the messages entirely?
    Otherwise, if it’s not a monoalphabetic substitution, and it’s not transposition-based, and it’s not a Vigenere, what other options (maybe digraph-based?) are there?

  20. bob connors on February 2, 2014 at 1:29 am said:

    Hasn’t anyone noticed that they look like the ten commandments on their two tablets?

  21. SirHubert on February 2, 2014 at 9:28 am said:

    Bob: yes, they have.

  22. SirHubert on February 2, 2014 at 7:12 pm said:

    Bob: one big problem with the idea that the Moustier tablets contain an enciphered version of the Ten Commandments is that seven or eight of the Commandments start with the same word or phrase: something along the lines of “thou shalt not” in English, “tu ne…” in French or “non…” in Latin. But there is no obvious trace of this in the Moustier ciphertext.

    So, if the plaintext text is an version of the Ten Commandments, it must have been enciphered in a way which obscures this. There are ways of doing this, such as polyalphabetic ciphers which were certainly known in the nineteenth century, but which were used for diplomatic and military messages because they were considered unbreakable. I think it would be surprising to have something of that complexity used to encipher the Ten Commandments for a parish church altar in Belgium – you never know, but I have a feeling we are all missing something obvious here.

  23. SirHubert: at the same time, I’m pretty sure that the letter frequency distribution wasn’t any where near flat enough for a full-on polyalphabetic cipher, so it’s kind of a double crypto mystery. Which makes me think that we’re ‘reading’ this at the wrong kind of level.

  24. Bob, Sir Hubert,

    The ‘something obvious” has been explained before in my reply to Nick”s ‘Paul de Saint-Hilaire’s notes on Moustier Church…’ (April 2013). The obvious thing is, that in Roman Catholic churches and on grave stones only the initials of words are presented like in the I.N.R.I. and the XP signs, in this case probably a text from the Vita St. Martini. I would agree with Nick that we’re reading this at the wrong kind of level as it is intentionally not a code to hide the secrett of a message.

  25. SirHubert on February 3, 2014 at 12:01 am said:

    Nick: I’m sure you’re right, judging by the letter and digraph frequency.

    Menno: with respect, I see what you’re getting at, but aren’t the abbreviations you describe very much shorter? I can think offhand of INRI or AMDG or EUOUAE and I’m sure some are longer, but these tablets have eighty letters each. and include W and K which would be difficult for Latin or French (and, I suspect, Walloon also). But I agree with you in that I don’t think this was designed to be excessively difficult to translate or decipher, and again this supports Nick’s view that we shouldn’t expect a full-on polyalphabetic cipher here.

  26. Am new to “the Moustiers”, and am curious about one aspect: in what position to eachother stand (or used to stand, before reconstruction) the two altars and their inscriptions? The inscriptions may have been conceived to be read “antiphonally”, just as, for example, the statues of the founder figures at the Naumburger Dom converse with eachother across empty space.

  27. ioannestritemius: if you’re looking down the length of the church, the Maria altar is situated to the left of the main altar and facing back towards you, while the St Martin altar is situated symmetrically to the right of the main altar, and also facing back towards you.

  28. Etienne on July 17, 2016 at 11:53 am said:

    Nick:
    Your assumption of potential use of languages as stated in text above

    quote
    And being in Belgium, you’ve got Flemish, French, German, and Latin (at least) to choose from as possible plaintext languages.
    quote

    should probably be restricted due to location and period to French and Latin.
    The regions concerned by German language have been “included” in Belgium after WW I, and are pretty far from Moustier location.
    Moustier is way closer to the flemish region, however French at that time had some sort of priviledge status for high / middle class, potential sponsor to pay for the altar’s

  29. Etienne on July 17, 2016 at 12:07 pm said:

    Nick: found a link to a local network provider in Belgium dated 30 nov 2015

    http://www.notele.be/list155-un-village-media38897-les-cryptos-de-l-eglise-bientot-decodes-.html

    Philippe Connart former Intelligence Service from Belgian army has an hypothesis that it is copied from old monk (Agambertus ?) writing from “Abbaye St Amand les eaux”, as he found similarities with written text from same monk.

  30. nickpelling on July 17, 2016 at 12:11 pm said:

    Etienne: I would strongly agree with you, except that we have not the faintest flicker of an idea about the rationale behind the two altars. As such, we should remain defensive against the range of possible languages that might have been used here.

    The book I’d most like to read is Connart’s history of Moustier, that may inadvertently point us in the right direction to be looking. 🙂

  31. nickpelling on July 17, 2016 at 1:55 pm said:

    Etienne: thanks for the link, I will watch the report as soon as my Internet allows me to. *sigh*

  32. bdid1dr on July 17, 2016 at 10:33 pm said:

    Nick,
    Is it possible that one of the two altars may have been a baptismal? If so, what language would be used at each altar?
    bd

  33. bdid1dr on July 17, 2016 at 10:51 pm said:

    I only 1-dr because when my younger son was baptized (Catholic) shortly before his marriage to a Vietnamese woman, the baptismal paper document gave him three ‘saints’ names in addition to the name I gave him at his birth.

    My babysitter also had him baptized when he was about a year old (with my permission). Altogether, over a period of 25 years, he was baptized three times.
    So, my question is “are all newly-baptized persons’ records being kept in any kind of church archive?

  34. milongal on July 18, 2016 at 10:33 pm said:

    bd: Was he baptised, or did he get the full kit and kaboodle (ie Confirmation as well).
    In baptism you are given your Christian name (traditionally named after Saints, but that’s a tradition that seems to have long been ignored – and I’ll admit I’m not certain whether there’s some significance in the middle name, but I suspect the tradition is that this could be less religious but identify you as a specific X)), and in confirmation you choose another Saint’s name (usually Confirmation happens when you’re older – when I was at School it used to be the last year of Primary School, but I think they now bundle it in with First Holy Communion at about age 10 – at least in this neck of the woods – so by the time Confirmation comes, you’re old enough to choose your own Sponsor (someone who would mentor you in the Catholic faith and takes a sort of spiritual parent role – not unlike a godparent at baptism), and a Saint who you admire or plan to model your life on (at least in some way)).

    So going through Catholic rites and ending up with 3 new Saints names sounds more like RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) where 3 (or 4?) sacraments are bundled into 1….(the 3 being Baptism, Holy Communion and Confirmation – the possible 4th is Reconciliation).

  35. Alex Ulyanenkov on December 11, 2017 at 8:43 am said:

    Wow! Now, I guess, I found the first part of the key! So interesting!

  36. Alex Ulyanenkov: very intriguing – if you’d like to discuss it with me, I’m always happy to offer a confidential ear. My email is nickpelling at nickpelling then a dot and a com.

  37. Alex Ulyanenkov on December 11, 2017 at 12:38 pm said:

    Dear Nick, I’ve sent the solution to you and to Klaus Schmeh. Please check your mailbox.

  38. Alex Ulyanenkov on December 11, 2017 at 12:52 pm said:

    It is no problem for me with confidentiality – if you will find the idea interesting for the community – you can publish it here.

  39. Alex Ulyanenkov: thank you for your three emails – while you have put forward some interesting options for future study, I’m still very far from sure that you’ve nailed anything like the solution of this particular inscription. All the same, I’ll have a further think about it and try to post some thoughts shortly…

  40. Alex Ulyanenkov on December 11, 2017 at 6:01 pm said:

    Because of that I prefer to send you an e-mail first.

  41. Alex Ulyanenkov on December 11, 2017 at 6:06 pm said:

    As I explaned earlier – my degre is image analysis and all that is around. It is a small part of cryptology. Very small, but a part…

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