Now the 75,000-character 'Copiale Cipher' cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leaning of a 18th century secret society in Germany.
This manuscript has all the ingredients of a thriller, a handwritten message in arcane symbols and Roman letters spread over 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.
Now the 75,000-character 'Copiale Cipher' cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leaning of a 18th century secret society in Germany.
"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California, part of the team that finally cracked the Copiale Cipher.
"Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out. And a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered," he added, according to a Southern California statement.
To break the Copiale Cipher, Knight and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection.
They then transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.
"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."
With the Copiale Cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.
"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight says. After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realised the Roman characters were "nulls", intended to mislead the reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.
The team then tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter, or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of initiation", followed by "secret section".
Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught.
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