Cod. Pal. Germ. 597’s cipher…

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Yet another interesting comment from Rene Zandbergen yesterday (to my flying potions post) sparked off a furious flurry of bloggery here at Cipher Mystery Mansions. While browsing through a large set of online manuscripts digitized (and hosted) by the University of Heidelberg, he found Cod(ex) Pal(atinus) Germ(anicus) 597 – an alchemical manuscript where a large amount of it is written in cipher (which you can download as a 15MB PDF file). Rene writes:-

Now this is a clear example of a MS where cipher has been used to hide secrets. It leaves me with the question:

Why does the Voynich MS not look like this?

My tentative answer: the Voynich MS isn’t actually just a cipher MS. FWIW.

(–Actually, I have my own answer to this, but we’ll get to that in a minute.–)

It seems to me that (unless Augusto Buonafalce happens to know better) the literature on Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 is pretty thin: even the Karl Bartsch catalogue entry for it (marked 287 here) isn’t much use. The Ms also merits the briefest of mentions on p.355 of the 1994 book “Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart” (it’s in Google Books). None of which, however, addresses its cipher aspect… but I guess that’s my job. 🙂 So, let’s have a look at it…

The Ms commences on folio 2r with some crossed-out ciphertext above some commentary in a different hand. (Some later pages hold only a few lines of ciphertext, so it seems likely that this originally contained just the ciphertext.) And then on folio 4v, the ciphertext (interleaved with Latin and German plaintext) starts in earnest:-

cpg597_f4v

This is a basic-looking system comprising about 23 symbols, that shows every sign of being a simple (i.e. monoalphabetic) cipher consistent with its date (1426).  The cipherbet was designed not for convenience of writing (for there are numerous fiddly characters, including a blocked-in black square), but around an apparently improvised ‘personal shape alphabet’. This points not to a cipher professional (working, say, in a Chancellery) but rather to an amateur cryptographer designing his/her own ‘homebrewed’ system:-

cpg597_main_cipherbet

The letter shapes fall into three rough groups (as per the lines above):-

  • Abstract shapes / known shapes
  • Dots and containers
  • Semi-representative (aide-memoire?) shapes (hammers, spade, rake?)

But then, just as you’re getting the hang of that, a completely different monoalphabetic cipher appears (from folio 6v onwards). This looks to be a refinement of this first system… but this post is getting a bit too long, so I’ll defer discussing that to another day.

Is this a “cipher mystery”? Yes, but only a very temporary sense, for I find it terrifically hard to believe that this wasn’t picked up by one or more of the numerous 19th century German codebreaking historians and cracked in a trice (or perhaps even a millitrice). Tony Gaffney would surely munch such a light confection before breakfast. 🙂

Finally, to respond to Rene Z’s question: why does the Voynich Manuscript not look like this? I’d prefer to start by looking at what this does resemble: Giovanni Fontana’s lightly-enciphered books of secrets, which were also from very same period. This mixing of text and ciphertext also occurs in Buonaccorso Ghiberti’s copy of his famous grandfather’s Zibaldone, which has some sections in a simple cipher, most notably what Prager & Scaglia call the “secret hoist” (on folios 95r and 98r of BR 228, for which see “Brunelleschi: Studies of his Technology and Inventions”, pp.67-70). From the simplicity of that cipher (“use the previous letter in the alphabet”), I’d suggest that Buonaccorso probably copied this from an older document, one probably made in the 1430s or 1440s (Lorenzo Ghiberti died in 1455).

Remember that this was the century when paper began to become affordable, and when ordinary people began to develop their own ciphers: and although it has become fashionable to criticize the development of individualism in the early Renaissance, I think it is fair to say that the desire to keep secrets for personal / familial gain runs in close parallel with this. Ghiberti, Fontana and the author of Cod. Pal. Germ. 597 all seem vastly similar in this respect.

Returning to Rene’s initial question, then, I suspect the correct question to be asking should be: why does the Voynich Manuscript not look like any of those ciphered manuscripts?

My own answer is that it is probably because the VMs will turn out to be from circa 1460 (i.e. 20-30 years after all of the above), and its author seems to have benefitted from contact with the sophisticated code-makers in the Milanese Chancellery, who developed and refined ideas in their own cryptographic bubble. Really, the VMs is from a very specific time and place – far too clever to be early 15th century, but still strongly mindful of what earlier ciphers looked like.

Johannes Hartlieb and flying potions…

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Following my recent post on modern per-degree astrology, Rene Zandbergen very kindly left a comment here pointing to online scans of a 15th century German translation of some of Pietro d’Abano’s works on astrology. While idly flicking through that, I noticed (starting on folio 132r) a short book by Johannes Hartlieb on ‘Namenmantik’ (onomancy, using names to tell fortunes). Dating right to the middle of the 15th century, this shows circular volvelle-like things that remind my eye of Alberti’s speculum (his rotating code wheel):-

hartlieb_132r_cropped

Cod. Pal. germ. 832 Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch, folio 132r

Given that this kind of thing was in the air round that time, was it mere chance that Alberti happened to devise it first? It’s true that Hartlieb’s ones (like the one for Ptolemy above) probably didn’t rotate at all… but all the same, I do honestly think it wouldn’t have involved a vast leap of mid-Quattrocento imagination to make them do so.

But the mention of Hartlieb reminded me of another research strand I’ve been meaning to blog about – flying potions. You see, it was Hartlieb who first wrote (in 1456) about witches’ flying potions, in his puch aller verpoten kunst, ungelaubens und der zaubrey, i.e. on “forbidden arts, superstition and sorcery”.

Reading up again on this subject just now, I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Ioan Couliano’s colourful account of how the handles of broomsticks were used to administer the hallucinogenic unguent turns out to be only supported by a single (and fairly unreliable) source. Mainly, the ointment seems more likely to have been administered to the armpits and absorbed into the bloodstream from there. Still, it probably beats flying cattle class on a charter flight, right?

To me, the bizarre thing about the historical sequence is that in the early Middle Ages it was heretical to believe witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly delusional), while during the Early Modern period it became heretical to disbelieve witches’ descriptions of flight (because they were clearly possessed by the Devil). So much for the continual march forward of knowledge! 😮

For much, much more on this fascinating subject, I heartily recommend Shantell Powell’s set of pages on flying potions. Enjoy!

Per-degree astrology, old and new…

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For years, it has been suggested that the structure of the Voynich Manuscript’s “zodiac” section (where each 30-degree sign has 30 nymphs / 30 stars linked to it) might be encoding some kind of per-degree astrology information. Famously, Steve Ekwall claimed that an “Excitant Spirit” had told him the types of star here denoted the outcome of conception (i.e. a male birth or female birth). This would have been either from the precise degree that the moon was passing through at the time of conception, or from the precise time when the question was asked of the astrologer.

libra-small
Voynich Manuscript page f72v1 – Libra (contrast-enhanced)

Interestingly, there is also a substantial modern literature on per-degree astrology, usually known as “Sabian Symbols”. The best-known set of these was drawn up by Marc Edmund Jones in San Diego in 1925 (you can see it on pp.10-26 of this Italian PDF): this was later refined and popularized by Dane Rudhyar (and others).

Yet Jones was building (to a certain degree, one might say) on the work of two nineteenth century astrologers / psychics: Charubel [John Thomas] (1828-1908) and the colourful Theosophist Sephariel [Dr Walter Gorn Old] (1864-1929). There’s a 1998 biography of the latter by Kim Farnell called “Astral Tramp” (Blavatsky’s nickname for Walter Old). [Review] Charubel & Sephariel’s 1898 “The Degrees of The Zodiac Symbolized” contains two 360-degree lists that are, it has to be said, wildly different.

On the surface, this would appear to be two completely parallel, relatively modern, and entirely unconnected re-inventions of the sort of (probably originally Arabic) per-degree astrology described by Pietro d’Abano – and so something Voynich researchers should perhaps strive to walk around rather than to engage with.

Certainly, Charubel’s list was specifically described as having been channeled:  yet Sephariel claimed that he had actually translated the symbols from a very old book called “La Volasfera”, by Antonio Borelli (or Bonelli) – and so there is, right at the core of the whole modern Sabian Symbol tradition, a very specific claim to a lost Renaissance parentage. Unfortunately, nobody has (as far as I can tell) since tracked down this lost author or this lost book, so Sephariel’s claim might… just… possibly… not be entirely truthful. Really, it’s hard to say, particularly as Sephariel was so, well, unreliable. Oh well!

If you want to read more about Sabian Symbols, there is a surprisingly large amount of literature: the Astrological Center of America maintains a pair of webpages (here and here) listing numerous books on Sabian Symbols and on other per-degree systems (respectively).

Finally, here’s an example of modern astrologers’ describing and using Sabian symbols, which might help make it clear how they are broadly intended to be used.

Voynich newsbites…

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News arrives from the New Journal Magazine at Yale (via Jeff Haley on the Voynich Mailing List and Elmar Vogt’s Voynich blog, thanks to you both!) that “two outside specialists” at the Sterling Memorial Library have been “analyzing the pigments in [the Voynich Manuscript’s] ink and carbon dating a tiny sample of its vellum“. Hooray!

Though Yale was perhaps spurred on to do this by the documentary that is currently being made, it is not clear whether the lack of results or details published as yet is because of some arrangement-to-withhold with the film-makers, or perhaps because the results are so astonishing that it’s taking ages to write them up. 🙂 Hopefully we’ll find out soon…

The 2009 Kalamazoo medieval congress continues apace (until tomorrow) – did anyone see Angela Catalina Ghionea’s Voynich plant presentation? I should perhaps comment here that her ongoing dissertation topic “The Occult Origins of European Science” seems hugely ironic to me, given that I view a lot of Renaissance & modern occult practices as being built on top of misunderstood proto-science – so if I was writing a dissertation, it would be on the “The Scientific Origins of European Occultism“. But which of us, then, is the contrarian? 😮

Finally… after a period of domain transition, my compellingpress.com site is now back online: there’s still a small boxful of copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” sitting in the corner, all awaiting owners. 😉

Calcagnini letters book at auction…

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Twice a year, the Leiden antiquarian bookseller Burgersdijk and Niermans hold a book auction – the one coming up shortly is on 19th-20th May 2009.

Flicking idly through the listings, I noticed that going for (what seems to me a very reasonable) 300-ish euros is a 1608 printed edition of the 365 letters of the philosopher / astronomer Celio Calcagnini of Ferrara (1479-1541) – his Epistolarum criticarum & familiar. There’s more on Calcagnini here and his claim to have preempted Copernicus (Thorndike even discusses him [Vol V], so he can’t be all bad). He gets a brief Wikipedia mention, and was a major influence on Rabelais (of all people). Hmmm… if I was filthy rich, this book is exactly the kind of historical frippery I’d fritter away my hard-earned money on. I might even go up to 310 euros, you never know. 🙂

(Note that a copy of the Basel 1544 edition of his letters (Opera Aliquot) is also on sale on the Internet, though 12,500USD isn’t quite such a bargain. Conrad Gessner once had a copy of it, too.)

Calcagnini wrote on many subjects: on the significantly cheaper end of the scale (i.e. free), there’s an online scan of his 1534 book “De imitatione eruditorum quorundam libelli quam eruditissimi puta” here and another of his books here, both courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. There’s a 2006 paper on Calcagnini by Jan Papy: and he merits a good page-and-a-half in the 2003 book Contemporaries of Erasmus (yes, he knew and corresponded with Erasmus too), which you can see on Google Books.

Alternatively, if you haven’t yet been inspired to make a mad impr0mptu telephone bid, you might possibly be more tempted to splurge an an early printed set of Libavius’ works (including Paracelsian and Rosicrucian controversies in the appendix), a B&N snip at an estimated 3800 euros! As always, your choice…

How to become an Ascended Master of Google-fu…

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Because Google is like a jetcar with a 20-speed manual gearbox, first gear is plenty for most people. However, if you want the other 19 gears, here are some ideas to get you fired up (just make sure you’re pointing in the right direction first)…

Google’s 2nd gear – Exact-fu

Without much doubt, I think the two basic Google tricks everyone should know are:-

  1. If you want an exact word match (i.e. not a nearest sound match, or a plural/singular), precede the word with ‘+’. This is most useful when (as is often the case with historical research) you’re looking for a particularly obscure word or name, for which Google will suggestion zillions of alternatives. For example, if you want to search for Sirturi (but don’t want the 46,000 hits returned by Sireturi), search instead for +Sirturi and you’ll get the 79 hits you do want.
  2. If you want an exact phrase, wrap the phrase in double quotes. For example, searching for Nick Pelling gets 144,000 hits (any page containing the two words will do) – but searching for “Nick Pelling” will give you a mere 9,250 hits. (Lazy hack: you can usually omit the final double quotes, Google is smart enough to fill them in for you.)

Basically, if you know that a given (fairly rare) search term is correct, you’re normally better off preceding it by ‘+’, to ask Google not to get in the way. Of course, leave out the + if you’re not 100% sure!

Note that these two tricks overlap: if you Google for (the doubly-misspelt) cypher mistery, the top result is for cipher mystery (i.e. Google suggests corrections to both words) – but if you search for “cypher mistery” (i.e. the same word pair but in quotes), Google only suggests web-pages with one change to the pair of words.

Google’s 3rd gear – Success-fu

A recurring problem is how to deal with the vast number of pages returned (even with 2nd gear Google-fu): and with just the one lifetime at your disposal, how could you ever sensibly go through a million hits? Of course, you can’t: but here are some neat Google trickettes to help you when your search query has proved, errrm, too successful:-

  1. If there is some unrelated idea that is diluting your search results, add a word associated with that secondary strand to your search but precede it with ‘-‘. For example, if you want to search for Voynich but don’t want any hits related to the Broken Sword computer game (written by Charles Cecil’s company Revolution Software), you could search for Voynich -Revolution. For bonus Google-fu points, try excluding multiple things at the same time, such as Voynich -Revolution -Ethel -ufo
  2. Use “100 results per page” as your default Google preference. The “Page Down” button (or, more likely these days, “mouse scroll-wheel down”) is a quick way of browsing 10x more results than you would otherwise get. OK, it’s not ideal, but any half-decent researcher should be capable of speed-reading, surely?

In short, being able to use ‘+’, ‘-‘ and double-quotes effectively is a good practical starting point for would-be Googlers. Note: while it used to be the case that Google’s engine caused these mechanisms to interfere with each other (specifically, you used not to be able to search for quoted strings and excluding search terms at the same time), these days they seem to have sorted all that out. Just in case you run into some outdated information on the web! (As if…)

Google’s 4th gear – Refinement-fu

Let’s say you’d like to craft a search query to yield a manageable set of results – say, 50 or 100 hits. But what do you do if your ‘vanilla’ two word search gets a million hits, but an exact phrase search gets only 2 or 3 hits? How can you coax Google into returning a more useful number of hits?

  1. The OR operator (in caps) lets you merge pairs of search words. Rather than search for Sirtori telescopium and then search for Sirturi telescopium, you can search for Sirtori OR Sirturi telescopium – much more useful. If you’re after bonus Google-fu points here, try using multiple ORs in the same search, such as Sirtori OR Sirturi telescopium OR telescope
  2. Number ranges have their own merging trick! If you separate two numbers by two dots (i.e. 2006..2008), Google will find you pages containing any number in that range (though note that this doesn’t work with negative numbers, maths fans). A nice example is that searching for Voynich “500..700 ducats” will dig up references both to 600 ducats (Marci) and to 630 ducats (Dee) – pretty neat!
  3. The ‘*’ operator lets you find documents containing a pair of words separated by one (or two) words. This can be useful when you’re searching for two words that are connected but which don’t usually appear exactly next to each other. For example, if you wanted to find my middle name, Googling for Nick * Pelling returns pages with Nicholas John Pelling – here, note that because I didn’t specify +Nick, Google silently converts it to Nicholas. Also, note that you can progressively weaken the link by adding more stars in a line, but only if you put them inside double quotes – so, “Nick ** Pelling” and “Nick * * * Pelling” will all find pages where the two words appear progressively further apart (however, “Nick * * * * Pelling” won’t work, sorry!)

Basically, once you can consistently use your refinement-fu to control Google, you’re not coping with search results any more… you’re managing them.

Google’s 5th gear – Zigzag-fu

This is a hard one to describe, but as it defines a gear change all of its own, it needs its own section.

The big takeaway from the preceding gear-fu should be that the point of searching is not to find the perfect page, but rather to find a sensible range of pages clustered around the perfect page – while Google is pretty good at getting you close, you still need to be actively exercising a fair bit of choice if you’re going to find what you want. The skill lies in crafting queries that get you reasonably close (but not too close) to where you want to go.

However… in practice, the whole process doesn’t usually work out quite as well as you would hope – you can’t always “just get closer”, shaving 1,000,000 hits to 100,000 to 10,000 etc. The noble art of “zigzag-fu” involves constructing queries that iteratively zigzag you towards your final query – too many results is bad, too few results is bad, and too spammy / too general a set of results is also bad.

Zigzag-fu is where you build up a feeling for what you’re looking for (even if you haven’t seen it before), and somehow move around it and towards it without really realizing how. People with great zigzag-fu get to where they want to without really thinking – but as this is more of a craft skill, I’m struggling a bit to explain it.

Just practise – I’m sure you’ll get there yourself (if you’re not already there, of course). 😉

Google’s 6th gear – Operator-fu

Google has a sprawling set of obscure “operators” (you can usually recognize them by their trailing colon) for refining searches according to different aspects of the pages found. Having said that, in most cases these are usually only marginally useful – the big trick is realizing when you’re in a big enough hole that only a special-purpose Google crane can hoist you out. “Operator-fu”, therefore, isn’t so much a refined sense of power as a refined sense of danger – i.e. has your search floundered?

  1. site: – this operator filters out only those pages whose website name (partially) matches the pattern. So, if you only want to find Voynich pages on US university websites, searching for site:.edu Voynich should do the job. The OR operator works on this, so searching for site:.edu OR site:.ac.uk Voynich will find Voynich pages on US and UK university webpages. You can also use this to see how many pages Google has indexed from a given site: for example, searching for site:ciphermysteries.com yields about 613 results (as of today).
  2. intitle: / inurl: / intext: / inanchor: / allintitle: / allinurl: / allintext: – these tell Google where to look (and, conversely, where not to look) for the keywords you specify. So, searching for allintitle: Voynich Decoded will list all the webpages in Google’s index that contain the words “Voynich” and “Decoded” in the title. Not very useful, but might possibly save the day.
  3. filetype: – if you are trying to find (say) a pdf containing the phrase “chilled monkey brains”, then Googling for filetype:pdf “chilled monkey brains” should work OK. There are also a load of obscure Google filetypes (such as htpasswd), but that’s a story all to itself. 🙂
  4. date: – very useful for finding things within the last N months. Not very useful otherwise. 🙂
  5. daterange: – very useful for finding things within a range of dates. Sometimes a big help!
  6. The tilde (‘~‘) operator forces Google to look for synonyms, even when it doesn’t itself think the word is ambiguous. However, this isn’t really very useful as (by and large) Google guesses right.

For more on these (and other mad Google operators), there’s a nice guide on the Google Guide site.

Google’s higher gears – Ninja-fu

(OK, OK, I know it’s mashing Japanese and Chinese words together, but I wanted to evoke a feeling of mastery over many worlds – just so you know!) Ascended Google Ninja-fu masters come up with a constant stream of tricks that make just as much use of Google’s sprawling array of secondary search apps (half of which the GooglePlex’s Borg mind has probably forgotten about) and its business model. There’s also a 2003 O’Reilly book called Google Hacks, most of which is now out of date, but which should arguably be given to ten-year-olds with their first proper laptop. 🙂

But to such a 33rd Scottish Rite Googler as yourself, it should be clear by now that everything Google does and has is fair game. Here are just a handful of things to consider, from an insanely long list:-

  1. Google lets you search for ampersand and underscore characters (maybe it’ll help one day).
  2. Google doesn’t match search phrases over paragraph boundaries (that’s just the way it works).
  3. Google knows about C++ and C# (helpful for programming searches)
  4. You can search for stopwords (such as ‘the’, that Google normally discards) by preceding them with a ‘+’. Though some searches (such as for The Who) do automatically include them!
  5. PageRank dominates short query strings, context dominates long query strings. If you can decide whether PageRank is helpful or unhelpful for your query, you can adjust your query length accordingly.
  6. Google API-based tricks – too many to list
  7. Google Trends-based tricks – too trendy to list
  8. Google Widget-based tricks – too new to list
  9. Google’s cache, calculator, weather, currency, recipe, flight information… you get the idea!

Of course, if I disclosed these kinds of secrets, I would be hauled in chains before the New World Order’s special blogging oversight committee and thoroughly excoriated (and I like my corium just the way it is, thank you very much). Besides, because Google changes all the time, so does the array of useful higher-gear tricks – and so you’ll be unsurprised to find out that the real art of being an Ascended Master of Google-fu is… making up your own tricks.

Enjoy! 🙂

Hans Carvel, retold for the txt generation…

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While sorting out boxes of old books at the weekend, I dug up a 1955 Penguin copy of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. It’s one of those books you tell yourself you’re going to read ‘one day’, safe in the knowledge that such a day will probably never arrive.

…which (in this case) would actually be a crying shame, because it’s cracking stuff. Rather than being some kind of moralistic Renaissance fable written by a worthy-but-dull soul, it’s actually a mad Renaissance satire on such books, written by an erudite drinker to amuse and entertain other erudite drinkers. In fact, even ‘ribald‘ is far too wimpy a word to describe it:  in the absence of some hitherto-unknown 30-syllable German word that would fit it perfectly, ‘blisteringly fecal‘ is about as close as I dare get.

Honestly, you’d like it, trust me! 😉

Yet for centuries after Rabelais, authors seem to have lost their bawdy anti-fable mojo: James Joyce is about as close as moderns get (but he’s a wholly different kettle of mad fish, to be sure). Irvine Welsh has flashes, but he’s still no Rabelais, sorry! Anyone else? Your suggestions on a postcard, as always. 🙂

Actually, I’d say that the closest modern artform to the kind of thing Rabelais wrote is in fact the dirty txt msg – everyone seems to know someone who gets twenty filthy texts a day. Where do all these come from?

Well, if Rabelais is anything to go by, I’d say that the prototypes for most smutty jokes were probably dreamed up during the 15th century, yer blessèd Quattrocento (though he did dress them all up in his own distinctive way, it has to be said).

And so I took up a writing modern challenge: could I fit Rabelais’ wonderfully ripe story [Book 3, Chapter 28] of Hans Carvel (jeweller to the king of Melinda) into a 160-character text message? Here’s the result:-

"While you wear this ring",
said the Devil in Hans Carvel's dream,
"no other man can £%*& your wife!"
She woke up yelling "Hey!
Take your finger OUT of THERE!"

How little has changed over the centuries, eh? Enjoy! 😉

“Fringe” Glyph Cipher broken…

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Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez was belatedly watching the first season of “Fringe”, and recalled a discussion by Erica Sadun of all the hidden “Easter eggs” embedded in the edit. What caught his eys in particular was a “glyph code”, a distinctive pattern of shapes that popped up just before the commercial breaks. Could he break it?

Well… Julian just happened to recall a piece of code published by David Eppstein at UC Irvine for smashing your way into any monoalphabetic substitution code given a probability-weighted wordlist. And when he tried it out on the Fringe glyphs, it yielded their secrets almost at once (despite several errors in the ciphertext fragments – it’s just like the Renaissance all over again, eh?)

OK, I still prefer the Adrenalini Brothers’ cipher. But this one is nice too, in a kind of demented pigpen kind of way. 🙂

Florentine astrology shorthand…?

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Here’s a nice palaeographic puzzle for you! While looking at some images from a linked pair of Florentine astronomical / astrological manuscripts written circa 1400 (as Voynich researchers inevitably do), I noticed that one had an unknown shorthand (?). So far I’ve only had access to a handful of the pages, so the full document would probably contain several more examples – but the three below should be enough to get you going (click to see a higher-resolution image).

florentine-cipher-mystery

Personally, I’m reminded of the Quattrocento astrological shorthand that Robert Brumbaugh described finding on the back of a manuscript of a Plato text (he was, after all, a Plato scholar, though I don’t know which ms that was), which in turn reminded him of the Voynich Manuscript’s lettering.

The text around it is in Latin, relating to individual signs of the zodiac: and a quick examination reveals that many patterns appear in all three of the fragments. But what does it all mean? Any suggestions?

Once again, two more Renaissance ciphers yield to Mr Gaffney…

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By now I’m sure you’re all thoroughly sick of the way I heap superlatives and laurel wreaths onto Tony Gaffney’s hair-bestrewn head every time he cracks yet another of Bellaso’s ciphers… and now he’s broken two more, lifting his tally for the 1564 set of challenge ciphers to 6 out of 7. Though Tony dearly wants to make it 7/7, Bellaso’s remaining 1564 cipher appears to be an awkward one, a real Holmesian three-pipe problem… so let’s keep our fingers crossed Tony can make it a clean sweep. 🙂

Anyway, as compared to #7’s tortuous digrams, #3 turned out to be relatively easy: it involved five rotating reciprocal alphabets (Bellaso’s favourite starting point), with the confounding trick being that the first letter of each group is basically random, and indicates which one of the five rotated alphabets to use (by using the index of the letter within the cipher alphabet). There are asterisks marked at the two places (in lines 1 and 3) where this fails to quite work, but the basic idea seems completely solid.

1564 #3

 lasumita  demonti  secnserva  perche  lacque  otneve
CNRDEPSGT XEQRLLGP FDUHLLQMXX AMCABAA HPEEOHU MIDLDHU
 45123451  5123451  123451234  345123  234512 *234512
 chesopra  deesi  spesocadono  insi  contengono  leesalationi
REFQFLQAT NSUAIB GFMCLGTEHQFI TNLLP EBIJFDFNLLQ OPACLTPEFBGGN
 45123451  12345  23451234512  3451  1234512345  234512345123
 etvageri  terestri  asesi  nelaria  oxvirtu  solare  etcosi
FQCXXUQMN RFDLUGFAP SRDUGS BLDRHQSR PMCHOQFP QDIOXAQ LCGBIGS
 12345123  45123451  51234  4512345 *4512345  123451  451234
 latgu  cheper  lepiogie  scorgzoso  demonti  xepiogie  etnevi
CNRANX DXUUMCA MSQLNMTPU AGEQLNZLIQ FSUPMMAO RADIOLBBQ SDAGARB
 45123  512345  51234512  345123451  1234512  45123451  512345
 larepone sopra  detimonti
HPEUDIIICXLGLQX QSUDSNGGDS.
 23451234 51234  123451234
QFEN QUACDFGILM 1
     EHTBSNOPRX
UGHO QUACDFGILM 2
     XEHTBSNOPR
AITP QUACDFGILM 3
     RXEHTBSNOP
CLBR QUACDFGILM 4
     PRXEHTBSNO
DMSX QUACDFGILM 5
     OPRXEHTBSN

The (possibly meaningless?) keyword here is “QUA(C)EHTBS”, yielding a cleartext like this:-

La sumita de monti se conserva perche l’acque ot neve
che sopra de esi speso cadono in si contengono le esalationi
et vageri terestri asesi ne l’aria ox virtu solare et cosi
la tgu che per le piogie scorgzoso de monti xe piogie et nevi
la repone sopra deti monti.

And so we move onto Bellaso’s 1564 challenge cipher #4, which is also a bit of a pussycat (yes, it has five rotating reciprocal alphabets) – the secondary trick here is the autokey, wherein the last plaintext letter of each group indicates which of the five alphabets to start the next group with.

1564 #4

etper ilcontrario simarre conserva lasua profocsita
NCUTA REXEECSUAUB NUEFPAN FAGRTAIX HOUPU QHBADFMRDU
12345 12345123451 5123451 51234512 51234 5123451234
etgrandeza perche fluctrbu viena sotiliare larena etparte
MDLAOGTTZR FLPFRM PEAFBIXA IRLIR NACQGMOIL HOILIR OBFFPGN
23451234-5 234512 23451234 12345 512345123 512345 5123451
teree chein esosono liqualli cosi sotiliati etcon lacqua
CLPON XLNRH OFBRDSA DQSBODEN FAUQ NACQGMOCQ OBTCI DFXPIX
23451 45123 5123451 23451234 5123 123451234 51234 234512
mescolati sono salavirtu solarein aria levati etdali venti
INUODHOCQ FBHD MXEUBUIDA FBEUANRH OIQU ETBOCQ OBLFGM SLIGU
512345123 1234 123451234 12345123 1234 345123 512345 23451
indiverse plrti portati ethnacqua conversi restano
MELQAOHUL QCIDN FCPGOCQ MDMSOTIAR TCIBNIRN ANUDUSA
512345123 51234 2345123 234512345 23451234 5123451
distributi sulimonti etin altrilochi
OMFCSNUICQ FSENIAGDN NCQI XEEAUDCXLU.
4512345123 123451234 1234 2345123451
SDFM  SPABCDEGHI   1
      FXOTLMNQRU
PEXN  SPABCDEGHI   2
      UFXOTLMNQR
AGOQ  SPABCDEGHI   3
      RUFXOTLMNQ
BHTR  SPABCDEGHI   4
      QRUFXOTLMN
CILU  SPABCDEGHI   5
      NQRUFXOTLM

The (once again, somewhat mysterious) keyword here is “SPAFXOT”:-

et per il contrario si marre conserva la sua profocsita (profundita)
et grandeza perche fluctrbu vien a sotiliare la rena et parte
teree che in eso sono li qualli cosi sotiliati et con l’acqua
mescolati sono sala virtu solare in aria levati et da li venti
in diverse plrti (parti) portati et hn acqua conversi restano
distributi su li monti et in altri lochi.

Observant cryptologers will be pleased to note that Tony managed to crack both of these even though neither contained the word proportione. 🙂

Praise aside, all that I can say now is “Go, Tony, Go!” – good luck with the final cipher in the set!