Global InformationCopiale cipher information
| Copiale cipher | |
|---|---|
| private collection | |
 Pages 16–17 | |
| Type | codex |
| Date | 1730s |
| Place of origin | Wolfenbüttel |
| Language(s) | German, encrypted in abstract symbols, Greek and Roman letters |
| Author(s) | Oculist secret society |
| Size | 105 pages |
| Contents | Oculist initiation ceremony |
| Other | Deciphered in 2011 |
The Copiale cipher is an encrypted manuscript consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters filling 105 pages in a bound volume.[1] Undeciphered for more than 260 years, the document was decrypted in 2011 with computer assistance. An international team consisting of Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and Viterbi School of Engineering, along with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, found the cipher to be an encrypted German text. The manuscript is a homophonic cipher that uses a complex substitution code, including symbols and letters, for its text and spaces.[2]
Previously examined by scientists at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in the 1970s, the cipher was thought to date from between 1760 and 1780.[3] Decipherment revealed that the document had been created in the 1730s by a secret society[1][2][4] called the "high enlightened (Hocherleuchtete) oculist order"[5] of Wolfenbüttel,[6] or Oculists.[5][7][8] The Oculists used sight as a metaphor for knowledge.[9]
The manuscript is in a private collection.[1] A parallel manuscript is kept at the Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel.[5]
The Copiale cipher includes abstract symbols, as well as letters from Greek and most of the Roman alphabet. The only plain text in the book is "Copiales 3" at the end and "Philipp 1866" on the flyleaf. Philipp is thought to have been an owner of the manuscript.[5] The plain-text letters of the message were found to be encoded by accented Roman letters, Greek letters and symbols, with unaccented Roman letters serving only to represent spaces.
The researchers found that the initial 16 pages describe an Oculist initiation ceremony. The manuscript portrays, among other things, an initiation ritual in which the candidate is asked to read a blank piece of paper and, on confessing inability to do so, is given eyeglasses and asked to try again, and then again after washing the eyes with a cloth, followed by an "operation" in which a single eyebrow hair is plucked.[10]
- ^ a b c "Computer Scientist Cracks Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher'". American Association for the Advancement of Science. October 25, 2011.
- ^ a b New York Times: John Markoff, "How revolutionary tools cracked a 1700s code," October 24, 2011, retrieved October 25, 2011
- ^ "Rätsel nach 250 Jahren gelöst: Forscher entschlüsseln mysteriöse Geheimschrift". bild.de. 27 October 2011. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
- ^ [1] Archived 2011-11-12 at the Wayback Machine (the complete proceedings) or [2] (the relevant presentation): Knight, Kevin, Megyesi, Beáta and Schaefer, Christiane "The Copiale Cipher," Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on building and using comparable corpora, pages 2–9, 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Comparable Linguistics, 24 June 2011. Retrieved October 25, 2011
- ^ a b c d Knight, Kevin; Megyesi, Beáta; Schaefer, Christiane (2011). "The Copiale Cipher". Uppsala Universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi website. Retrieved 2011-10-25. Includes images of the full text, as well as full translations in German and English.
- ^ Henning, Aloys "Eine frühe Loge des 18. Jahrhunderts: 'Die Hocherleuchtete Oculisten-Gesellschaft' in Wolfenbüttel", in: Europa in der frühen Neuzeit, Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfordt 5, Aufklärung in Europa, hg. Erich Donnert, Köln/Weimar/Wien 1999, S. 65–82.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Wired Nov 2012was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ USC Scientist Cracks Mysterious "Copiale Cipher" on YouTube, on the official USC channel.
- ^ Shachtman, Noah (Nov 16, 2012). "They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside". Wired. Vol. 20, no. 12. Retrieved May 13, 2020 – via www.wired.com.
- ^ Boyle, Alan (October 25, 2011). "Secret society's code cracked". MSNBC. Archived from the original on November 2, 2011. Retrieved October 25, 2011.