Polygraphiae Libri Sex

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Royal
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Polygraphiae Libri Sex

Post by Royal » Wed Feb 29, 2012 11:36 am

The first printed book on cryptography, Polygraphiae Libri Sex (Six books of Polygraphy), was written by German abbot Johannes Trithemius and published in 1518 after his death. Polygraphiae contains hundreds of columns of Latin words, arranged in two columns per page.

a. Deus a: clemens
b. Creator b: clementissimus
c. Conditor c: pius

To encode a message, one uses a word to stand for a letter. Remarkably, Trithemius constructed the tables so that the coded passage appears to make sense as an actual prayer. For example, if the two letters in a message were CA, the prayer would start the Conditor clemens[ (Merciful Creator)/i] as the first two words in a Latin sentence. The remaining books of Polygraphiae present more sophisticated cryptographic methods, along with tables, for creatively hiding information.


Trithemius's other famous work Steganographia (written in 1499)and published in 1606) was placed on the Catholic Church's "List of Prohibited Books" because it appeared to be a book about black magic, but in reality was just another code book.

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