One fascinating (if hard to pin down) cipher mystery that I’ve been meaning to get to grips with is the Rohonc Codex. This is a vaguely Bible-like book, written on Venetian paper with a watermark dating it to circa 1529-1540, but looks like it ought to have been written centuries earlier. And (you’ll be unsurprised to hear) nobody can read it.

Well, until such time as I find some credible source on the statistical properties of the text (which is where I’d personally want to start from), here’s a nice Passing Strangeness blog entry that describes the Rohonc Codex pretty darn well. Enjoy! 😉

…or, in all its prolixitous glory, “The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World’s Greatest Cryptographers“, by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as “Can You Crack the Enigma Code?” in 2006.

You’d have thought I’d be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, Elgar’s “Dorabella” cipher, the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, and the “Zodiac Killer” ciphers, all things that a Cipher Mysteries blogger ought to get excited about. But there was something oddly disconsonant about it all for me: and working out quite why proved quite difficult…

For a start, if I were compiling a top six list of uncracked historical ciphers, only the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Papers would have made the cut from Belfield’s set – I don’t think anyone out there could (unless they happened to have cracked either of the two) sensibly nitpick about these being included.

Yet as far the other four go, it’s not nearly so clear. I’ve always thought that the Dorabella cipher was a minor jeu d’esprit on Elgar’s part in a note to a dear friend, and most likely to be something like an enciphered tune. The Kryptos sculpture was intended to bamboozle the CIA and NSA’s crypto squads: and though it relies on classical cryptographic techniques, there’s something a bit too self-consciously knowing about it (its appropriation by The Da Vinci Code cover doesn’t help in this regard). And while the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument (Belfield’s best chapter by far) indeed has hidden writing, placing its ten brief letters into the category of cipher or code is perhaps a bit strong.

Finally: the Zodiac Killer ciphers, which I know have occupied my old friend Glen Claston in the past, forms just about the only borderline case: its place in the top six is arguable (and it has a good procedural police yarn accompanying it), so I’d kind of grudgingly accept that (at gunpoint, if you will). Regardless, I’d still want to place the Codex Seraphinianus above it, for example.

Belfield’s book reminds me a lot of Kennedy & Churchill’s book on the Voynich Manuscript: even though it is a good, solid, journalistic take on some intriguing cipher stories, I’m not convinced by the choice of the six, and in only one (the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument) do I think Belfield really gets under the skin of the subject matter. While he musters a lot of interest in the whole subject, it rarely amounts to what you might call passion: and that is really what this kind of mystery-themed book needs to enliven its basically dry subject matter.

It’s hard to fault it as an introduction to six interesting unbroken historical codes and ciphers (it does indeed cover exactly what it says on the tin), and perhaps I’m unfair to judge it against the kind of quality bar I try to apply to my own writing: but try as I may, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it over (for example) Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” (for all its faults!) as a readable introduction to historical cryptography.

PS: my personal “top six” unsolved historical codes/ciphers would be:-

  1. The Voynich Manuscript (the granddaddy of them all)
  2. The Beale Papers (might be a fake, but it’s a great story)
  3. The Rohonc Codex (too little known, but a fascinating object all the same)
  4. John Dee’s “Enochian” texts (in fact, everything written by John Dee)
  5. William Shakespeare’s work (there’s a massive literature on this, why ignore it?)
  6. Bellaso’s ciphers (but more on this in a later post…)

Feel free to agree or disagree! 😉

Another Voynich-themed novel is announced: “In Tongues of the Dead“, written by Canadian author and forensic psychologist Brad Kelln, to be published by ECW Press in October 2008. It’s his third book (“Lost Sanity” and “Method of Madness” were his others, with some kind of Dead Sea Scrolls prophecy hook to the second one). According to Kelln’s blog, in his day-job he is “a consultant to the Halifax Police and the Nova Scotia RCMP on hostage negotiation“.

In his soon-to-be-published book, an autistic child visiting the Beinecke library is miraculously able to read the VMs… revealing it as “the bible of the Nephilim”. The manuscript then gets stolen, the (presumably) bad guys in the Vatican chase the various protagonists across the world, but they get helped out by a plucky Canadian psychologist doctor guy with a sick child: and whatever happens at the end happens at the end.

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit negative because the ECW Press blurb describes the VMs as “a 400-year-old document” (I don’t think so, sorry), but this whole book does sound a bit join-the-dots to me. Look: the Voynich Manuscript is a fantastic cipher mystery, but there’s absolutely no reason to think it has any religious (let alone sacrilegious) content. My old friend GC once tried to argue that a couple of the women in the water section were holding things that might possibly be crosses: but that is a pretty thin reed to be balancing any kind of sophistical superstructure upon.

Cryptographically and historically, I think that Kelln should have instead built his story around the Rohonczi Codex or Rohonc Codex, A.K.A. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (“The Hungarian Academy of Sciences“) MS K 114. This has 448 pages filled with as-yet-undeciphered text, is thought to have been written on Venetian paper from the 1530s, and has 87 illustrations apparently depicting “religious, laic, and military scenes” (according to Wikipedia). There’s a complete set of scans here.

Older historians thought this codex was simply a hoax: but it actually has a lot of order and structure, all of which seems to point to its being meaningful in some unknown or unexpected way. At the Warburg Institute recently, Professor Charles Burnett mentioned to me in the lunch queue that a European scholar (whose name I half-remember as “Gyula”, so might well be Hungarian?) is just about to publish a paper on the Rohonc Codex: a proper academic perspective on this would be very welcome, as just about all the hypotheses circling around it seem fairly lame.

To be brutally honest, if I was Kelln’s publisher, I’d negotiate with him to drop the Voynich Manuscript angle, and to rebuild the first part of the story around Budapest (a far more intriguing town than New Haven I would say, having spent time in both) and the Rohonc Codex. But what do I know?

Incidentally, there’s a conference currently running at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the fascinating reign of King Mathias. Yet another event I would have loved to attend. *sigh*