History Of Cryptology

Although cryptology has been around almost as long as civilization, the first recorded use of it was by the Spartans circa 400 B.C. The Spartans used a device called a scytale (seen above) to send secret messages to military commanders to inform them of their mission. A scytale is a baton around which a strip of papyrus was wrapped, and a message was written on. After the papyrus was unwrapped, it seemed like a meaningless jumble of letters. To read it, the recipients rewrapped the papyrus around a baton with an identical diameter. Later, a Greek named Polybius created a device that enabled him to encode letters into two groups of symbols. This device was called a Polybius checkerboard (seen below), and is the basis for a multitude of cryptic systems that came after it. The Arabs were the first society to have a clear understanding of cryptology, and the first to realize how to decypher codes and cyphers using cryptanalasis. Since the Arabs, cryptology has been used for diplomatic communications, military and intelligence messages, and now in computers, making up the very language which computers are based on.