IT and History: Scholars crack ancient notes of Freemasons

Scholars have managed to decode an old manuscript known as “Copiale Cipher”, which for many years has exited interest of historians and linguists. The manuscript was discovered in one of the archives of the former German Democratic Republic and is now in a private collection. 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.

A team of scholars from the USA and Sweden headed by Kevin Knight from the University of South California, Information Sciences Institute have succeeded in cracking the cipher. It turned out that the book used to belong to a German secret society, Scottish Freemasons, and reads about rites of the lodge. Many historians believe that such societies played a great role in revolutions and coups, still many of the survived documents are encrypted and can’t reveal the details.

Kevin Knight – one of the world’s most recognized specialists in machine translation – has designed computerized statistical analysis, which tried to trace down meaningful words in one out of 80 languages. After trying all the languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls" intended to mislead the reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message. The team later tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter or groups of letters. They divided the text into separate words, which were analyzed. The book appeared to have been written in German, and the first meaningful words were “Ceremony of Initiation” and “Secret Section”.

Now Kevin Knight hopes that the software he has developed will help to decode other mysterious cryptograms, for example, the Voynich Manuscript and an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters.

The original text of Copiale Cipher, deciphered German text and translation into English are available on a special website.