[gatagato]

The “Copiale Cipher” is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. Apart from what is obviously an owner's mark (“Philipp 1866”) and a note in the end of the last page (“Copiales 3”), the manuscript is completely encoded. The cipher employed consists of 90 different characters, comprising all from Roman and Greek letters, to diacritics and abstract symbols. Catchwords (preview fragments) of one to three or four characters are written at the bottom of left–hand pages.

Transcription, transliteration and decipherment brought to light a German text obviously related to an 18th century secret society, namely the "oculist order". A parallel manuscript is located at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel.

For information about the method of decipherment, see the paper “The Copiale Cipher” (.PDF) by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer (2011), presented as part of invited talk at ACL Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC).

The Copiale Cipher was solved by the researchers forming a hypothesis for computers to test. With three different kinds of characters used, from the Roman and Greek alphabets, to abstract symbols, the researchers assumed they were not all important to the message. Eventually the readable text was revealed, starting with, "Ceremonies of Initiation," and "Secret Section."

Download:

text scan:

• display-150dpi
  
• color-booklet.pdf (A4, 26MB)
• download-150dpi.zip
• download-400dpi.zip
• English translation: txt, docx, pdf

http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/new...php?id=1744105

[sherrimccharles]

Very very cool

[collaredgirl65]

[kellyhound]

clever

[Blewvane]

10 years, 3 million dollars, 47 scientists and computer geeks, and well over 200 deaths later and the book is translated. It is a recipe for mushroom & bacon soup!!