Mga eksperto, nagawang malaman ang tunay na kahulugan ng isang ancient code, ngunit pinag iingat ang publiko!

Every codebreaker’s fantasy — or nightmare, depending on how long it takes to crack the code — is a book full of weird symbols from hundreds of years ago. Christiane Schaefer’s strange going-away present sparked a decade-long mystery involving ancient ciphers, eccentric teachers, and possibly even brushings with the devil. Schaefer was desperate for an explanation, but she had no idea that her inquisitiveness would lead to the revelation of dark secrets from the past…

When German-born Schaefer opened the parcel in 1998, she was confronted with a warning: “TOP SECRET.” But that wasn’t the aspect of the package that piqued Schaefer’s interest the most. The array of symbols scratched across the outside of the gift attracted her interest instead.

Schaefer’s work as a philologist, or expert in the history of languages, was dedicated to the study of living and dead languages. She’d seen, researched, and cracked many ancient runes and codes, but this one made her hair stand on end.

The present itself consisted of over 100 pages of symbols that clearly dated back hundreds of years. Her first reaction, to parse out any familiar characters, proved futile, as the code appeared to be a jumble of mathematical symbols, Roman letters, ancient runes, and forms, none of which seemed to fit together.

The strange document didn’t get Schaefer’s attention again until 2011. And this time, she was aided by contemporary technology and another bright mind. When Schaefer first met Kevin Knight, she was attending a presentation on computational linguistics.

Knight had evolved into a codebreaker of a different sort during the course of his career. He claimed that algorithms may be utilized for more than just following mathematical or computational laws. They may even be used to decode entire languages, particularly ones that employed symbols to represent words.

Almost every language, according to Knight, is a sequence of decipherable ciphers. He had to figure out the ruleset, or “key,” — effectively, how that particular language functioned — in order to solve these “codes.” This may sound like gibberish to those of us who aren’t linguistic or codebreaker experts.

Knight began to string words together one by one, letter by letter. After months of arduous work, he discovered that the code was significantly more complicated than he had anticipated. He recognized that many symbols represented the same letter. It’s clear that whoever developed this code didn’t want anyone to figure it out.

When Knight had another epiphany, it became even apparent. He discovered the Roman letters didn’t spell anything. They were used to separate the text and served as spaces. With it, terms like “der” (“the” in English) and “antwortet” (“the candidate answers”) began to fall into place.

“This stroke is the sign/symbol of the beginning of the confidentiality/familiarity that the brother, who will be our companion from now on, can expect from us…” This statement proved to be critical to their comprehension of the material. It wasn’t a prank at all; it was a rite of passage.

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