Quotes from David Kahn

Another steganographic system was still in use in the 20th century: Aeneas suggested pricking holes in a book or other document above or below the letters of the secret message. German spies used this very system in World War I, and used it with a slight modification in World War II—dotting the letters of newspapers with invisible ink.

soon as a culture has reached a certain level, probably measured largely by its literacy, cryptography appears spontaneously—as

For almost a thousand years, from before 500 to 1400, the cryptology of Western civilization stagnated.

Tradition attributes to St. Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary who founded monasteries in Germany in the eighth century, the importation to the continent of cryptographic puzzles based on a dots-for-vowels system.

Hildegard von Bingen, an 11th-century nun who saw apocalyptic visions and was later canonized, had a cipher alphabet which she claimed came to her in a flash of inspiration.

The only writer of the Middle Ages to describe cryptography instead of just using it was Roger Bacon, the English monk of startlingly modern speculations. In his Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic, written about the middle of the 1200s

the most famous of all those who had an acquaintance with cryptology in the Middle Ages was an English customs official, amateur astronomer, and literary genius named Geoffrey Chaucer.

the conviction in the minds of many people that cryptology is a black art, a form of occultism whose practitioner must, in William F. Friedman's apt phrase, "perforce commune daily with dark spirits to accomplish his feats of mental jiu-jitsu.

Cryptology served magical purposes frequently throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the Renaissance was still disguising important parts of alchemical formulas.

The association of magic and cryptology was reinforced by other factors. Mysterious symbols were used in such esoteric fields as astrology and alchemy—where each planet and chemical had a special sign, like the circle and arrow for Mars—just as they were in cryptology. Like words in cipher, spells and incantations, such as "abracadabra," looked like nonsense but in reality were potent with hidden meanings.

All this stained cryptology so deeply with the dark hues of esoterism that some of them still persist, noticeably coloring the public image of cryptology. People still think cryptanalysis mysterious. Book dealers still list cryptology under "occult." And in 1940 the United States conferred upon its Japanese diplomatic cryptanalyses the codename MAGIC.

But of any science of cryptanalysis, there was nothing. Only cryptography existed. And therefore cryptology, which involves both cryptography and cryptanalysis, had not yet come into being so far

Extremist sects in Islam cultivated cryptography to conceal their writings from the orthodox.

The Arabic knowledge of cryptography was fully set forth in the section on cryptology in the Subh al-a 'sha, an enormous, 14-volume encyclopedia

Also of great importance in the discovery of linguistic phenomena that led to cryptanalysis was the development of lexicography.

The technique was at least moderately well known, for Ibn Khald?n wrote in The Muqaddimah: "Occasionally, skillful secretaries, though not the first to invent a code [and with no previous knowledge of it], nonetheless find rules [for solving it] through combinations which they evolve for the purpose with the help of their intelligence, and which they call 'solving the puzzle [cryptanalysis].

Analyzing the frequency and contacts of letters is the most universal, most basic of cryptanalytic procedures.

I can't say I ever remember getting less than a whole child in my 29 years here.They come in whole and I teach 'em that way.