One of the varieties of wise litorei is secret writing "in the squares." In the 17th century manuscripts of primarily grammatical content, tables of forty squares were placed in the form of a key to the “rhetoric letter” , each of which contained two different letters of the alphabet . Moreover, some letters were painted with vermilion (red), while others were simply ink (see Fig. 1). In addition, in the squares, along with the letters, some grammatical-orthographic terms were introduced explaining the meaning and character of the use of letters, which probably hid for the uninitiated to some extent that they deal with the key of the secret writing.
The rules of this literature are as follows:
- red letters are ordinary letters, black letters are rhetorical,
- both alphabets are strictly alphabetical, but the rhetorical alphabet begins with the fourth position of the usual or, equivalently, rhetorical alphabet is shifted three letters to the right [1] . That is, the rhetorical letter A corresponds to the letter G of an ordinary alphabet.
Since there are forty squares in total, it means that all letters are “hidden” in the letter .
Simply, the key of this secret writing can be represented in the form of two lines of correspondence of letters (see. Fig. 2).
The only example of practical use of this littorey "in squares" is in the manuscript of the Library of the Academy of Sciences from the collection of I. Sreznevsky (XVI century), where the scribe - Matthew the Tenth - in the afterword hid himself under three different kinds of secret writing, including "In squares" (see fig. 2).
Notes
- ↑ In Caesar's cipher, a similar shift of the coding alphabet by three letters, but to the left.
Literature
- MN Speransky "Secret writing in the South-Slavic and Russian monuments of the letter", M., 1929
- L.V. Cherepnin "Russian Paleography", M., 1956
- Babash A.V., Shankin G.P. The history of cryptography. Part I. - M .: Helios ARV, 2002. - 240 p. - 3000 copies - ISBN 5-85438-043-9 .