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The universes of cryptography 27 methods

Ancient scripts & real-world signals

Hieroglyphs, Irish ogham, Berber Tifinagh, Elder Futhark runes, Babylonian and Mayan numerals, Morse, semaphore, braille: writing and signalling systems that actually existed.

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Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian pictograms + phonograms. Champollion as the reading key.

Symbols ~3300 BCE — 4th century CE, ancient Egypt
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Real scripts, not invented ones

Every cipher in this universe shares one rare property: it was not invented. No novelist, no video-game writer, no film composer imagined them. They are writing, numbering or signalling systems that entire civilisations actually used.

To communicate, count, pray, or send long-distance messages — they are not hidden, they are learned.

Scripts carved in stone

On the monumental side you meet the classics: the Egyptian hieroglyphs deciphered by Champollion in 1822 thanks to the Rosetta Stone, the Irish ogham (4th–9th centuries) cut as notches along the edge of a standing stone, the Berber Tifinagh miraculously preserved by the Tuareg and adopted as an official alphabet in Morocco in 2003.

Alongside, the Elder Futhark runes (proto-Germanic, 2nd–8th centuries) and the Viking Younger Futhark. All of them tell stories of kingdoms, warriors, priestesses — with zero encryption intent, but rendered mysterious by the erosion of time.

Counting without 0-9: ancient numerals

The Babylonians count in base 60 four thousand years ago — a legacy still alive in our minutes and degrees. The Mayans invent zero in base 20 several centuries before the Indians. The Cistercian monks of the 13th century compress the numbers 0 to 9999 into a single glyph with four quadrants.

The Iñupiat of Alaska create the Kaktovik notation in the 1990s for their traditional base 20. The D’ni people of the Myst games are not real — but their base 25 numerals are mathematically irreproachable.

Communicating without voice: long-distance signals

The Chappe telegraph (1794) covers revolutionary France in less than fifteen minutes for a Paris-Strasbourg message. Morse (1838) digitises letters as dots and dashes transmittable over wire. Maritime flag signals, manual semaphore and flag semaphore survive today as ceremonial protocol.

The Second World War Navajo code-talkers were never cracked by the Japanese Empire — the combination of a rare language with a code-overlay remains one of the only examples of an unbroken military cipher of its era.

Writing without eyes, voice or Latin alphabet

Braille (1825, Louis Braille), French and American sign languages (LSF and ASL), the Moon system (1845) for late-onset blindness, the notation of musical notes itself, and contemporary systems like Hexahue which encodes every letter in a two-colour hexagon.

All of these prove that writing does not need a letter-by-letter Western alphabet to convey meaning. They are full-fledged writings.

Catalogue

Methods in this universe

27 methods

Scripts carved in stone

Ancient numeral systems

Long-distance signals

Tactile, visual & gestural