But it was good enough for any layman-anyone not initiated-not to decipher it. That way, basically, the message got garbled. Strasser: It was encrypted through a relatively simple substitution method: One cuneiform symbol was used for another. Waddell: Do we know how that message, the recipe, was encrypted? So very early on, there certainly were commercial interests in cryptographic communication, as much as there may well have been military interests. That was an interesting detail from a city along the banks of the Tigris River around 1500 B.C. As it turns out, later on, the secret had been unearthed and discovered, so later recipes were no longer encrypted because just about everyone knew it. It was an encrypted message in which craftsmen camouflaged the recipe for a pottery glaze that was a highly coveted item at the time. Gerhard Strasser: There is one very well written-up and documented cuneiform tablet in Mesopotamia, found around 1500 B.C. Kaveh Waddell: What’s the earliest example of humans encrypting their everyday language to keep it secret from others?
A transcript of our conversation appears below, edited for concision and clarity. I spoke to Strasser, now a professor emeritus in his native Germany, about the deep history of encryption. He tells of a Medieval German cryptographer accused of black magic, and an 18th-century government minister in France who devised an ingenious way to spy on visitors. Strasser, who studied the history of cryptology for decades at Pennsylvania State University, traces the development of encryption through the Middle East and Europe, and even to India, where it's mentioned in the Kama Sutra. But humans have been communicating with codes and ciphers for thousands of years, using rudimentary encryption methods to protect trade secrets and military orders, or simply to keep information private from neighbors.įor Gerhard Strasser, the story begins more than 3000 years ago, in Mesopotamia. The democratization of encryption is a recent phenomenon: Only since the 1990s has computer encryption been open and freely available. The most basic online transactions and communications that Internet users conduct every day are thoroughly encrypted in transit, and are undecipherable without proper keys. Never in history have more people had access to advanced encryption in their homes, offices, and pockets.