The Copiale Cipher
Kevin K. Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer · 2011
The Copiale cipher is a 105-page enciphered book dated 1866. We describe the features of the book and the method by which we deciphered it. 1. Features of the Text Figure 1 shows a portion of an enciphered book from the East Berlin Academy. The book has the following features: It is 105 pages long, containing about 75,000 handwritten characters. The handwriting is extremely neat. Some characters are Roman letters (such symbols (such as 1 and <). Roman letters appear in both uppercase and lowercase forms. Lines of text are both left- and rightjustified. There are only a few author corrections. There is no word spacing. There are no illustrations or chapter breaks, but the text has formatting: Paragraphs are indented. Some lines are centered. *This material was presented as part of an invited talk at the 4 th