[Music] in 1998 whilst working abroad in germany dr christian schaefer received a strange gift from fellow academic it was a small book about 100 pages and had ornate green cover according to a colleague it was thought to be written between 1760 and 1780 when she looked inside she was surprised to see that the neat handwriting pages were in a completely unintelligible script although i had some familiar letters from the roman alphabet the text also features greek lettering and some unique symbols never seen anywhere else it was clear that the book was a cipher an encrypted
code designed to hide a secret message the only words she could read were found on the inside cover philip 1866 and at the end copiales iii latin word relates to our word for code the book came to be known as the copialis cipher for 250 years its message remained unknown until 2011. we now know what it says here's how it's done uppsala sweden 13 years later a guest speaker from the university of southern california was visiting dr schaefer's university his name was professor kevin knight he was a specialist in machine translation and had previously created
algorithms to automatically translate one language into another similar to systems like google translate he had previously built a program that could translate dante's inferno based on the user's choice of meter and rhyme scheme but he's no cryptographer despite this schaefer approached knight with a book and the two began to discuss it along with schaefer's colleague globsilla berta megyesi the team soon began to establish that the book was indeed authentic and not a hoax they handed the cipher to professor knight to take back to california and with this the work begun being a computer scientist knight
transcribed the entire document onto a computer so it could be machine readable he found 88 unique symbols and gave each one a code this symbol became lip this one oh and this one said s so now with the press for button the text went from this to this but the cipher still made no sense but at least it was legible for his computer this would allow to work quickly able to efficiently run scans to figure out any patterns or future translations knight first looked to the roman letters scattered across the page he believed that if
he isolated them from the rest of the symbols the message would reveal itself in this theory all other symbols were nulls meaningless characters meant to throw off any cryptographers isolating the roman letters did not seem to reveal much at first they were scrambled and did not appear to have any meaning he ran the roman lettering through his databases of languages to see if any linguistic patterns emerged within the book nothing the attempt was failure and the cipher was still a mystery back to square one including all the letters this time he ran a computer scan
to see whether any letter combinations repeat themselves in the document this is a smart way to figure out certain letters as some letters only ever appear in pairs for example in english the letter q is almost always followed by you quit question queen square acquiesce words like sadiq and fakir are of the very few exceptions and are usually imported words from other languages if he could find unique letter pairs it would allow him to decipher his very first letters he ran a scan and this time found 10 unique character combinations in the text progress it
seemed that the vowels or circumflexes were frequently followed by a z symbol or a pi symbol this symbol was often followed by this one in some cases this pair had a third letter form at the end this three-letter pattern would allow professor knight to make his first breakthrough knight already had reason to suspect that the original language of the document was in german first the book was originally located in germany and second is the inscription philip 1866 which uses the german double p spelling of the name knight notice that in german c was almost always
followed by an h and so on moreover a ch is usually followed by t so he suspected that the mysterious three-letter pattern was cht he didn't realize it yet but he was right there are 26 letters in the alphabet but 88 letters in the copied cipher knight theorized that multiple symbols must have stood for a single german letter he played around a bit with the characters and soon discovered that these three symbols all stood for i it seemed to work and soon he started to assemble small words and sentences this became dare this became candidate
this became antwerped their candidate and fought it the candidate answers with this breakthrough knight continued to work on the code and steadily began to decipher more and more letters and quirks the circumflexed vowels all stood for e this cross symbol stood for sch and the colons doubled the previous letter soon knight was able to build an entire alphabet since he already transcribed a digital version at the start all he needed to do was run the alphabet through his document and success before him lair texts that no one had been able to read for 250 years
he was right the text was in german well lay before professor knight and soon dr schaefer and dr mcgissi was a series of rituals that described the initiation of the candidate into a secret group the text is older than they thought originally believed to be written between 1760 and 1780 it was more likely written between 1730-1740 here's the first page of the copialis cipher there are some large non-letter symbols yet to be decoded the team believe that they stand in for actual names of people and roles within the organization and cannot be decoded any further
first law book secret part first section secret teachings for apprentices first title initiation right if the safety of the is guaranteed and the is opened by the chief by putting on his hat the candidate is fetched from another room by the younger doorman and by the hand is led in and to the table of the chief who asks him first if he desires to become secondly if he submits to the rules of the and without rebelliousness suffer through the time of apprenticeship thirdly be silent and furthermore be willing to offer himself a volunteer in the
most committed way the candidate answers yes the book continues on like this describing complex initiation procedures and rituals except that is for the end the concluding pages offer a political commentary describing the natural rights of man and talks about self-evident truths that man is born free similar language to the american declaration of independence some 30 to 40 years after this document was produced making this document one of the earliest to be espousing these sorts of ideas but who were the authors of the document it's never made clear in the cipher but there are some clues
first this symbol that appears throughout the book it was believed to be a lip by night but after studying it schaefer believed it to be an eye then came the recurring phrase the light hand this was a phrase used by german secret society known as the a name derived from the latin word oculus meaning i officially known as the great enlightened society of oculus they were based in the german town of wolfenbutel on the outskirts of hanover they were a group of academics and surgeons who performed early forms of eye surgery and can be recognized
by their insignia featuring an eye they were seen as being highly protective and secretive and only admitted the most respected surgeons into their organization this is their public image at least the existence of a deeply complex encoded cipher implies that there is more to them than just eye surgery but that we just do not know the cypher doesn't have any more information so why the rituals why the political commentary at the end what happened to the group we know very little more about the oculus and the copialist cipher might be the best look into this
group we have we do know that around the time of the document's production in 1738 pope clement xii forbade all catholics from joining a larger more notable secret society the freemasons many saw the freemasons as a secret homosexual cult or political insurgent group others rumored that they worship the devil whatever happened the oculus were forced underground and the secrets went with them 250 years later and our little book emerges but let's not forget the genius that went behind cracking the copialis cipher naturally i've oversimplified it a bit so i've included links below that show professor
knight and his team's process with published papers and articles as well as links to the full document itself since the copialis decipherment knight has used his expertise to approach other cryptic texts including the zodiac killer cipher and perhaps the most enigmatic document of all time the voynich manuscript to this day both remain to be deciphered even by professor knight but that's the story for another day goodbye hey thank you for the end of this video i hope you enjoyed so the channel had a spike in views and subscribers since the last video it may be
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