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a bit history has presented us with countless mysteries some of which plague us to this day
who was jack the ripper what happened to the ark of the covenant was atlantis real but
other mysteries have proven easier to crack in particular ancient codes and ciphers that
people devoted years to solving allowing us to catch a glimpse into a long forgotten world
10. hieroglyphics ancient egypt has fascinated the modern world since long before it was even modern
the ancient culture is one of the most mysterious and awe-inspiring in all of human history to this
day the pyramids stand as one of the great wonders of the world but there was a long gap between
their culture and our own and understanding them was far from an easy task thanks in no small part
to the language gap deciphering the hieroglyphics that covered pyramids scrolls and sculptures would
be the only way to understand a world that had existed as far back as the 28th century bc in
the year 1799 a frenchman named bouchard working for napoleon found the rosetta stone while digging
the foundation for a fort near the town of rashid no one had been using hieroglyphs since around the
4th century but the rosetta stone provided the key to understanding them the stone featured the
same decree written in ancient greek demotic script and hieroglyphics it was essentially
a road map for reading the script jean-francois and polio was able to compare the glyphs to the
greek texts and first determine the names of cleopatra and ptolemy in 1822 the code had been
cracked and one of the oldest languages in the world was understood once more
9. the copul cipher few ciphers have as weirder history as the copul cipher a code used by
a secret group known as the occultist order who all had a real thing for eye surgery despite none
of them being surgeons nothing weird about that the cipher dates back to sometime between 1760
and 1780. there were 75 000 characters in a 105 page book all handwritten in encrypted german
roman letters and other symbols were used to make the cipher and cracking it required some modern
computer technology in 2011 code breakers had a lengthy process for figuring it out including
coming to the realization that the roman letters were all there to be misleading and weren't part
of the words being translated number eight the vigonier cipher the beginning here cipher dates
all the way back to 1553 when it was created by an italian cryptologist named giovan batista bellasso
although it earned its name from blaise de vignere to whom it was incorrectly attributed known today
as a very simple code but despite that it remained unsolved for over 300 years essentially a real
testament to not seeing something even when it's right staring in the face despite how easy people
seem to think it is to break in the present back in the day it was literally called the
unbreakable cipher the code uses what's called polyalphabetic substitution in something called
the vignette square the square involves writing the alphabet out 26 times each line is moved one
space to the left compared to the one before it to create a table of substitutions throughout the
cipher you would use different alphabets to create the code after choosing a keyword that can be used
to decrypt it a german soldier and code breaker solved the cipher back in 1861 by following the
pattern of repetition if you're interested you can actually look up plenty of examples for how
to encrypt or decrypt your own messages using it 7. pose challenge when edgar allan poe issues
a challenge people listen and in 1840 he wrote an article for a magazine asking for people to
send him a cipher that he couldn't crack it was a challenge to see if they could best the famous
author it ran for six months and poe claimed that he solved every legit cipher the people sent in
he also included two for readers to try their hand at solving from a person named mr wb tyler perhaps
in a testament to pose prowess as a code breaker or as a prank because maybe he wrote both of them
himself the codes were not easy to crack at all in fact it took 150 years for someone to do it the
first cipher was solved in 1992 and it turned out to be a text from a 1713 play called cato
but the second was harder and williams college put up a 2 500 prize for anyone who could break
it it wouldn't be solved until the year 2000 when a software engineer from toronto managed to figure
it out part of the problem stemmed from errors in the typesetting as opposed to the cipher itself
once it was solved the message was revealed to be just a flowery bit of prose that was perhaps
written by poe but perhaps not as it offers no insight into who wrote it or why 6. beel ciphers
legend has it that thomas j beal buried a fortune in golden jewels back in the 1820s
he hid his treasure somewhere around bedford virginia and then left a coded message relating
to their location to an innkeeper there are three cipher texts that need to be decoded to find the
treasure one tells you where the treasure is one tells you what it is and one tells you who owns it
plus the next of kin unfortunately two of these ciphertexts have not been decoded yet the third
is unsolved as well as the first however the second one was cracked and it detailed what the
treasure consisted of according to the deciphered text beal buried 1 921 pounds of gold and 5000
pounds of silver plus some jewels in iron pots underground the total value today is estimated
to be worth around 100 million dollars that is if it's real legend has it that the innkeeper
years after receiving the ciphers and realizing beale was never going to return tried to crack it
himself he failed and sent it to a friend who used the declaration of independence as a key to solve
the second cipher basically one had to take the numbers from the cipher and then align them with
the document so the cipher may have said 67 98 1167 and that meant you needed to look up the 67th
98th and 1167th word of the declaration to this day no one has had any luck solving ciphers 1 and
3. there are many who consider them to be a hoax as well but the jury's still out on that but hey
at least one was cracked and we know that somewhere out there perhaps a small fortune
awaits a brilliant code breaker alright we'll get back to today's video in just a second but first a
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you get an additional month for free wonderful now back to today's video 5. viking love letter about
900 years ago a pair of vikings shared a message written in ruining code this came to be known
as the jotton velour code and the nature of the message was lost for years was it raiding plans
for attacking a village recipe for some mead and epic perma warriors fighting their way to valhalla
not exactly the runes used were carved into a piece of wood the message was short and typical
for the time period as many simple runic messages were used for literally dozens
of reasons the jottenville code is just one of several ciphers that might have been used at the
time but it's also one of the most rare ones only nine examples of the code have ever been
found and it's believed it was used more as a way of learning how to use runes rather than
actually sending coded messages vikings used these runic messages to write things like love letters
and even jokes and graffiti the daughter velour code was the hardest to crack because there were
so few examples but luckily researchers found one in which two people signed their names using both
the runes and a much more common script the result allowed for the translation of the coded message
which turned out just to be kiss me and who said vikings didn't know how to have a good time
before the philosopher's stone no it's not just a harry potter title if you believe in alchemy
the philosopher's stone is a substance that can turn simple metals like lead or iron into gold
and arguably more importantly it was the elixir of life that meant it was supposed to be capable of
making you immortal in the 1600s alchemist john d and his son arthur put together a manuscript that
included a cipher it remained undeciphered until 2019 when a conference on alchemy and chemistry
brought it to light two scholars with an interest in cracking the code wrote a blog that included
the ciphertext in 2021 and put it out to the world for assistance from amateur code breakers a man
named richard bean cracked the code and determined that the code was actually a recipe for the
philosopher's stone whether anyone can follow the recipe and make the stone itself is another matter
3. cave pterodactyl black dragon canyon in utah has more than an amazing name
cabins there feature ancient cave paintings that date back to somewhere between the year 1
and 1 100 and were credited to the fremont culture the pictures on the wall created in a kind of red
ink have been debated for some time in an effort to determine what they might be are they people
animals or one of the most popular theories a pterodactyl a stranger question as it seems one of
the paintings depicted a large bird-like creature with massive wings and a long neck that looked
for all the world like a resident of jurassic park and that led to the obvious question of how anyone
in utah a couple of thousand years ago would have known what a pterodactyl looked like the painting
was discovered in 1928 and for decades there was much speculation over the nature of the image
in 2005 with the help of some x-ray fluorescence and a novel piece of software that can help
separate pigments it was determined the image was actually five different images overlapping
in reality it was a human-like figure and several animals meaning the fremont people had not
in fact visited the land of the lost 2. linear b imagine the thrill archaeologist arthur evans must
have felt back at the turn of the last century when on the island of creed he discovered three
thousand stone tablets written in a language that no living person had ever seen that was
the modern world's first contact with linear b the language dates back to around 1400 bc far earlier
than other known languages from the area and was the earliest form of what would become greek it
predates what had previously been considered the greek alphabet by hundreds of years evan
spent three decades working on deciphering what it found his work was later taken up by alex cobra a
scholar who also devoted her life to deciphering the text with the work evans and cobra had done
in place an architect named michael ventress started trying to crack the code in his spare time
even doing so while he served in world war ii he began to translate ancient place names until
the language was deciphered fully by ventress and a man named john chadwick in the late 1940s
through to 1953 revealing itself not to be minoan as some had suspected but the earlier form
of greek 1. maya glyphs back in the 16th century the thriving maya culture was nearly destroyed
completely by the spanish those that survived had their culture stripped away their beliefs
were replaced by christianity and their language was replaced by spanish it's a similar story to
any time in history when an advanced conqueror comes and lays waste to a native population
and the loss of culture and history is tragic fortunately some of the ma
would survive and that includes maya glyphs the albert lost language has been studied since the
conquest of their culture began cortes is believed to have sent one of the four illustrated bar books
that still exists back to spain deciphering the myoglyphs proved to be a laborious process the
spanish had minimal success with them efforts picked up some steam in the 1800s but it was not
until the 1900s when many of them were finally translated fully in 1981 the final piece of the
puzzle was deciphered when the language was able to be read out loud for the first time
in several hundred years so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did
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