Ancient Scandinavians wrote encrypted messages in runes 1500 years ago

Individuals residing in Scandinavia might have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later utilized by the Vikings – a number of centuries sooner than beforehand thought.

In runic writing techniques, every rune can symbolize each a sound and a phrase. For instance, in an early runic system referred to as the Elder Futhark, the rune that corresponds to the letter S additionally means “solar”.

It’s typically attainable to translate runes into trendy languages. However we’ve lengthy identified that within the Viking interval, beginning in roughly AD 800, runes had been typically encrypted, so the textual content isn’t decipherable. One of the vital well-known examples is the Rök runestone in Sweden, which was erected within the late 800s and accommodates a prolonged, encrypted runic textual content. Nobody has been in a position to convincingly decipher it.

Now, historian Sebastian Zimmermann on the College of Lorraine in Nancy, France, is suggesting that encryption practices began a lot earlier. He carried out a survey of objects and paperwork bearing runes, together with weapons and jewelry, courting from the primary to the seventh centuries. Zimmermann introduced his findings final month on the HistoCrypt 2023 convention in Munich, Germany.

He discovered what he says is obvious proof of encryption on very previous objects. Certainly one of these is the Hogganvik stone, found by a resident of the eponymous Norwegian city whereas gardening in 2009, which dates to the fourth or fifth century. It accommodates runic inscriptions that may be translated and make sense, along with a bit of obvious gibberish that interprets as “aaasrpkf aarpaa”.

Zimmermann thinks this can be a substitution code, during which models of a number of runes are changed by a distinct unit. What provides it away, he says, is the unnatural repetition of letters and using “p”, a not often employed rune.

He additionally highlights two different runestones present in Sweden that he says present proof of encryption. One is the Noleby runestone, dated to about AD 600. The opposite is the Ellestad stone, dated to between AD 500 and 700.

Jonas Nordby, a senior curator on the Museums in Akershus group, Norway, says it isn’t unreasonable to assume that individuals encrypted runes this way back. In 2018, he printed an in depth research of runic cryptography in use from round AD 800. One cipher system from the time concerned utilizing pairs of runes to encode one other single rune. The repeated pairs of letters (akin to “aa” and “rp”) on the Hoggenvik stone, for instance, might symbolize an identical cipher sample, he says.

Nordby’s earlier analysis confirmed that by round 800, a number of rune cipher techniques had been in use. He concluded that they had been in all probability used as an train to assist folks be taught to jot down, in a society the place writing and studying was unusual.

Although we’ve little proof of it, he says this type of factor will need to have been occurring for at the very least 100 years beforehand – it couldn’t have appeared from nowhere. Really proving this is able to be extraordinarily tough, although, as it will contain discovering the important thing to the cipher, he says. “It’s a possible assumption that cryptography was in use again then, however we can not show it.”