Hey dear friends, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my contribution and hope you had a day full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to discuss an interesting topic and hope you can learn something new.
The word cryptography is derived from the Greek words kryptos for secret or hidden and graphein for writing and it is a subfield of cryptology that focuses on encrypting informations. It is a very complex topic that can be divided into different epochs and here I would like to devote myself specifically to cryptography in ancient Greece and to shed more light on this topic I have created works of art with artificial intelligence. In ancient Greece, it was particularly important to have secure communication channels during times of war, which were safe from the troops of the enemy and according to the Greek writer Herodotus, Greece was even saved by a secret script from the conquest of the Persian troops. The war between the Greeks and Persians reached in the 5th century BC its climax and the Persian troops were controlled by the king of the Persian king Xerxes, who at that time threatened to make the sky of Zeus part of the Persian empire. The Persians heavily armed their troops at that time and prepared for a surprising attack and the Greeks were lucky at that time that a outcast citizen of the Greeks who lived in the city of Susa at the time had noticed the strong armament of the Persians and he decided to send the Spartans a message to warn them of the upcoming invasion. He knew when his message blew up he had to expect bad consequences and this was the beginning of the first secret writing in Greece and he took a layer of wood at that time to write his message in there and then decided to cover the piece of wood with a layer of wax so that others did not suspect that there was a warning underneath.
When the board reached its destination, no one knew what to do until the daughter of a ruler came up with the idea of scraping the wax and then they found the message and decided to transmit it to the other parts of Greece and on the basis of this, the Greeks decided to equip their troops and prepare themselves unnoticed and so the invasion of the Persians could be stopped within a day. Herodotus also described in a story that a messenger's hair was once cut to then burn a message into the scalp and let it grow back and in this way the messenger could travel undisturbed and had no problems that his message was laid on. The method of hiding the messages without even noticing that there is a message in an object is also called steganography and this method is derived from the Greek words steganos for covered and graphein write and this method enjoyed great popularity in many countries and also the Roman Scholar Pliny the Elder also described an invisible ink that became visible after it was dry. Different methods according to this principle also developed in numerous other cultures and also Spartans who were known as one of the strongest military units of ancient Greece developed an intelligent method of encryption which was also called Scytale. Scytale was also a wooden stick and the sender cuts a strip of leather that he could wrap in the form of a spiral around the Scytale and then the message was noted on it and the strip was removed again and transported to the recipient and only those who were also in the possession of a Scytale could decrypt the message. This method was mainly used for military purposes and another method from ancient Greece was developed by the writer Polybius and it was possible to transmit messages unnoticed with the help of signs and was also known as Polybius cipher.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read through my post and I hope you like it and can learn something new about this interesting topic!