Codex Copiale
The Codex Copiale (provisional name) is an 18th century manuscript in cryptography that was not known to the public until 2011. The American computational linguist Kevin Knight from the University of Southern California together with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer from the University of Uppsala succeeded in deciphering the text in 2011. The text was written in German in contemporary orthography around the middle of the 18th century Contains the description of secret initiation rites of a German Masonic-like society that calls itself "Oculists". The code system was described and published in 2011. A scholarly revision of the transcribed text is not yet available. Scans of the original pages, the machine-readable text, the determined German-language provisional plain text and a provisional English translation are online (see section Web Links).
description
There is no precise information on the provenance and current owner of the tape (the work by Knight, Megyesi and Schaefer only says "from the East Berlin Academy" on the origin). According to various press releases from October 2011, the volume is said to have been examined in the 1970s at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in East Berlin without any results, or to have appeared there after the end of the Cold War or to be in private ownership (see Press reports section).
A web publication from November 2012 deals with the history of the decipherment and shows a picture from another manuscript in the same code in the Lower Saxony State Archives - Wolfenbüttel State Archives . The Wolfenbüttel State Archive keeps other documents and objects from which the history and practices of the Oculist Order can be inferred.
The codex comprises 105 pages with a total of around 75,000 characters and is written on high-quality paper and bound in a richly decorated cover made of green and gold brocade paper. The pages are paginated with Arabic numerals. Illustrations or references to the content are missing. The text is neatly and clearly written down by an experienced scribe with a few corrections. It is divided into sections, word separators are missing, custodians are inserted. The unknown script uses around 90 different characters, including the 26 Latin letters a to z , some of them with diacritical marks , plus other symbols with partly common (colon, individual Greek letters) and partly unknown forms. The only unencrypted notes of the band on the non-paginated contains flyleaf the words " Philipp 1866 " below as a final fee note "in a manuscript of the 19th century, continued on page 105 3. Copiales rth. “(Copies 3 Reichsthaler ) and on page 68 below a similar note crossed out beyond recognition, both in a manuscript from the 18th century. The note on the flyleaf is interpreted as a note of ownership, the end note was used by the decipherers to temporarily name the code system as a copiale cipher (copiale cipher).
Decryption
In 2011, a group of researchers led by the American computational linguist Kevin Knight found out that the text is encoded with homophonics . Each letter in the plain text is replaced by one or more symbols in the encrypted text; Frequently occurring letters are given several symbols. To obscure, additional characters were added as blenders that carry no information.
For decipherment, the first 16 pages of the codex were transcribed into a machine-readable text with 10,840 characters. Latin capital letters are only used at the beginning of chapters and have been converted into Latin lower case letters by the linguists. The statistical evaluation of the monogram frequencies (single character distribution) of the remaining 90 characters did not provide any information on the underlying language. The frequency distribution of the bigrams and trigrams indicated German, as did the name Philipp on the flyleaf (German spelling) and the origin of the codex (Germany). In order to identify characters with the same syntactic usage, the linguists calculated the cosine similarity of the placement vectors for each character. Finally, the researchers found that all Latin letters in the text without diacritical points can be interpreted as spaces or word separators; the remaining special characters can be replaced by letters. The deciphering turned out to be so difficult because some letters are enciphered by several symbols (so â, ê, î, ô and û of the cipher all stand for e ), a doubling of the letters is coded by a colon and for the bigrams that occur frequently in German st and ch and the trigram sch have their own symbols, so that the frequency distribution of the letters does not correspond to that of the natural German language. Eventually, about eight noticeable larger symbols were interpreted as logograms , which correspond to whole words. For example, a symbol that resembles an eye or a mouth (represented in machine-readable text as * lip *) stands for the name of the secret society. Only by comparing it with known texts, such as the public statutes of the Masonic-like Oculist Society in Wolfenbüttel, which appeared in print in the 18th century , can the symbol be interpreted as an eye and the term intended as an "oculist" (eye opener). In the Wolfenbüttel archive there are other writings in the same secret script. They have also been partially deciphered in the meantime.
See also
literature
- Law Book of the Highly Enlightened Oculist Society. Includes some general ordinances, duties and intentions thereof. Issued by special order of the Great Lodge By a Faithful and Honorable Brother and Master. 28 p. Without publisher, without place of printing and year (around 1745).
- Aloys Henning: An early lodge from the 18th century: “The Highly Enlightened Oculist Society” in Wolfenbüttel. In: Erich Donnert (Hrsg.): Europe in the early modern times. Festschrift for Günter Mühlpfordt. Volume 5: Enlightenment in Europe. Böhlau, Weimar et al. 1999, ISBN 3-412-17497-1 , pp. 65-82.
- Kevin Knight , Beáta Megyesi , Christiane Schaefer : The Copiale Cipher . Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on building and using comparable corpora. 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Comparable Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, June 24, 2011, pp. 2-9.
Press reports
- John Markoff: How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code (NYTimes.com October 24, 2011)
- Sven Stein: US researchers crack the German secret code (Bild.de from October 27, 2011)
- Nina Weber: Researchers crack a centuries-old secret code (Spiegel.de, October 27, 2011)
- George Szpiro: Symbolic nutshell. Researchers decode old ciphertext using methods from machine translation (NZZ.ch, November 2, 2011)
Web links
- Uppsala University: General Information The Copiale Cipher , August 2011
- Uppsala University: Preliminary German text, August 2011 (PDF; 222 kB).
- Uppsala University: Preliminary English translation, August 2011 (PDF; 212 kB).
- University of Southern California: The Copiale Cipher: Cracking the Code , October 12, 2011 (video, length 2:51 min).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kevin Knight ; Beáta Megyesi ; Christiane Schaefer : "The Copiale Cipher" (2011) ( Memento of the original from October 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 679 kB)
- ^ Noah Schachtmann: They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside , wired.com of November 16, 2012
- ↑ Paul Zimmermann: The Oculistenorden in Wolfenbüttel . In: Braunschweigisches Magazin 1922, pp. 31–34
- ↑ For comparison: In 1764 the fee for copiales in Leipzig was 1 g. (1 Groschen = 1/24 Reichsthaler) for one sheet, 24 sheets so 1 Reichsthaler and 72 sheets 3 Reichsthaler.
- ^ Aloys Henning: An early lodge of the 18th century: "The Highly Enlightened Oculist Society" in Wolfenbüttel. 1999, pp. 65-82.
