From five lines of letters scrawled on the back of a dead man’s book to the taunting codes sent to police by the Zodiac Killer, some of history’s most legendary uncracked codes and ciphers represent a fascinating and frustrating challenge even for the world’s brightest cryptographers. Could the Beale Papers lead to buried treasure? How does the Chaocipher work? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Taman Shud Case

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Who was the Somerton man, how did he die, and what do these strange codes found on a book connected to the man mean? An unidentified male body was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia in 1948 wearing a sweater and coat despite the hot day, carrying no identification. There were no clues as to his identity and dental records and fingerprints matched no living person. An autopsy discovered bizarre congestion, blood in the stomach and enlarged organs but no foreign substances. A suitcase found at the train station that may have belonged to the man contained a pair of trousers with a secret hidden pocket, which held a piece of paper torn from a book imprinted with the words “Taman Shud”. The paper was matched to a very rare copy of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’ that was found in the backseat of an unlocked vehicle and on the back of the book was scrawled five lines of capital letters    that seem to be a code. To this day, the entire case remains one of Australia’s most bizarre mysteries.

Kryptos

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It’s like a tease, standing outside the headquarters of the CIA in daily view of some of the nation’s brightest cryptographers yet eluding them for years. The Krytpos monument is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn bearing an encrypted message divided into four sections, three of which have been solved since its installation in 1990. With misspellings in the code intact, the first part reads, “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion”, and the second part references some invisible buried treasure ostensibly located some 200 feet from the statue itself.

Zodiac 340 Letter

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The Zodiac Killer – whoever he is or was – is known just as much for the incredibly complex coded letters he sent to the Bay Area press as for his brutal unsolved murders. While some of his taunting ciphers have been solved, this 340-character message sent in 1969 has never been cracked.

Dorabella Cipher

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Sent by cipher enthusiast Edward Elgar to his friend Miss Dora Penny, the Dorabella Cipher seems upon viewing like it might not mean anything at all. But this string of strange symbols, made up of semicircles in various configurations, has been the subject of unfruitful study for over a century. Musicologist Eric Sams claimed to have solved it, but his methods are unproven and his translation is 22 characters longer than the cipher. Another speculation is that the code is not text, but a melody.

Chaocipher

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If an autobiography detailing the author’s memories of James Joyce seems like a strange place to find an uncracked cipher, that’s because it is. J.F. Byrne inserted his cryptosystem challenge into the book “Silent Years”, offering $5,000 to whoever solved it. At least three people know how Byrne’s Chaocipher – a machine small enough to fit into a cigar box used to encrypt the message – actually works, but no one has ever solved the code.

RSA Crytographic Challenges

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How can the crytpography industry get better at producing strong, uncrackable codes? RSA Laboratories, a security firm known for its cryptography libraries, decided to put forth a challenge that would force the industry to learn more about symmetric-key and public-key algorithms. The key to cracking a code lies in figuring out which two prime numbers were multiplied together to create it – which is much harder than it sounds. While many of the prizes were claimed, most of the bigger numbers have never been solved.

D’Agapeyeff Cipher

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Alexander d’Agapeyeff wasn’t even a cryptographer – having previously written a book on cartography, he decided to tackle cryptography in his second book, “Codes and Ciphers”, in 1939. On the last page of the book, he included a modest cryptogram “upon which the reader is invited to test his skill.” But modest or not, d’Agapeyeff’s code has remained uncracked for 70 years, putting this amateur into the same league as the world’s most gifted cryptographers.

The Beale Papers

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Want $40 million in buried gold, silver and jewels? All you have to do is solve an infamously “impossible” set of ciphertexts, one of which effectively provides that much-sought X on the map.  The treasure was reputedly buried in Bedford County, Virginia by one Thomas Jefferson Beale, who entrusted his encrypted ciphertexts to a local innkeeper. After the innkeeper’s death, a friend who was given the papers spent twenty years trying to solve the ciphers, finally completing the one that describes the treasure. Despite many tries, the two others have never been solved.

Shugborough Inscription

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O-U-O-S-V-A-V-V. These letters are carved into a stone monument directly below a mirror image of Nicholas Poussin’s  painting, The Shepherds of Arcadia, on the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England – but what do they mean? Popular fiction imagines that Poussin was a member of the Priory of Scion and that the inscription refers to the location of the Holy Grail, but nobody really knows. Perhaps they’re an acronym for Orator Ut Omnia Sunt Vanitas Ait Vanitas Vanitatem, a version of the biblical phrase “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity” – but perhaps not.

Chinese Gold Bar Cipher

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The images seem to show a series of gold bars covered in images, strange symbols, Chinese writing, an unidentified script and crytpograms in Latin letters. These gold bars were supposedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China and deposited into a U.S. bank in 1933, but they’re so strange, the validity of the deposit is still disputed today. If someone can solve the script and codes, the dispute could be settled. Large images of all seven bars can be viewed at IACR.org.

Phaistos Disc

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From WebUrbanist’s “10 Most Amazing Ancient Objects of Mystery in History”: “There’s very little that we actually know for sure about the Phaistos Disc. It’s made of clay – check. It dates back to the second millennium B.C.E. – maybe. But its origin, meaning and purpose remain shrouded in mystery. Discovered in Crete, the disc is features i241 impressions of 45 distinct symbols, some of which are easily identifiable as people, tools, plants and animals. But because nothing else like it from the same time period has ever been found, archaeologists haven’t been able to provide a meaningful analysis of its content.”

Whether they contain spiritual secrets or mere mundane accounts of daily life, the ancient texts that today’s scholars just can’t seem to decipher could be keys to understanding civilizations that have long since passed from this world. Many of these 10 dead languages will never be understood, yet they live on as a cryptic reminder of the complexity not just of the world we live in but of our own history as a species.

Liber Linteus

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As if a linen book from a long-gone civilization weren’t fascinating enough, the origin of the Liber Linteus makes it even more morbidly amazing: it was once the wrappings on a mummy. Most of the Liber Linteus writings, which were removed from the female Egyptian mummy and later made into a book in the 19th century, can’t be translated because they were written in the little-understood Etruscan language. But what little scholars can understand reveals it to be some sort of ritual calendar.

The Rohonc Codex

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On 448 paper pages are transcribed – from right to left – unique symbols that total 10 times higher than any known alphabet in the history of the world. But nobody knows for certain just what the Rohonc Codex says, or who created it. Discovered in Hungary, the text has been studied by numerous paleography experts and scholars and appears to be religious in nature, with the code accompanied by illustrations and symbols of Christian, pagan and Muslim origin. Many Hungarian experts believe it’s a hoax, but if it is, it’s not gibberish – the  patterns of the text follow those of authentic languages.

Codex Seraphinianus

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It’s been called the weirdest book in the world, but the Codex Seraphininianus is much more than just a bizarre collection of lurid and surreal art. Created by Italian artist Luigi Serafini in the late 1970s, this is no ancient tome inscribed with some undeciphered language of old – but it does contain its own unique and unreadable alphabet which codebreakers have been unable to crack.

Rongorongo

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Could the Rongorongo be an independent example of the invention of writing, separate from those of which we already know? It wouldn’t be surprising, considering that this system of glyphs was found on the already incredibly mysterious and captivating Easter Island, known for its massive stone statues. The roughly two dozen wooden tablets, now located in museums across the world, can’t be confirmed as such – because experts can’t even determine whether the markings on them actually count as language.

The Singapore Stone

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Standing at the mouth of the Singapore River, the massive 10-foot-high sandstone slab known as the Singapore Stone is connected to a 14th century legend about a strongman named Badang, who was said to have hurled the stone into place. The stone was covered in a worn inscription that may now never be deciphered, given the fact that an engineer building a fort had it blown to pieces in 1843. One of the fragments was saved and is displayed at the National Singapore Museum.

The Voynich Manuscript

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The Voynich Manuscript handily won its place among WebUrbanist’s 10 Most Amazing Ancient Objects of Mystery in History: “Is the Voynich Manuscript evidence of a forgotten civilization, or merely an elaborate hoax? This handwritten book full of text that the world’s top cryptographers and codebreakers have never been able to decipher dates to the 15th century and was discovered in 1912 by book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich. If it is a hoax, it’s incredibly convincing, given how fluidly the text was written and the fact that statistical analysis has revealed patterns similar to those found in natural languages.”

Linear A

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It’s the key to deciphering numerous writings from the Minoan era of ancient Crete, but language experts just haven’t been able to discover the language of Linear A, a script found on many artifacts. Used around 1900-1800 B.C.E., Linear A was the official script of Cretan palaces and cults but it and any other Minoan language has been lost to history.

Vinca symbols

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Are the Vinca symbols the earliest form of writing in the world? Some archaeologists think so, while others maintain that they don’t represent writing at all. Perhaps they were just “proto-writing” – meaning they convey a message but don’t encode language – but either way, they have fascinated historians since they were unearthed by an archaeologist in Hungary in 1875. They were probably created between 4500 and 4000 B.C.E., and most scholars believe they were used for religious purposes.

Indus/Harappan Script

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Over 4,000 items bearing the mysterious Indus script have been found but to this day, nobody knows what they say; the language encoded within them has never been deciphered. Many have tried but none have succeeded, mostly because the average length of the inscriptions is so short, at about five characters each. Some scholars believe it represents a proto-Dravidian language, meaning it’s the forebear of the languages spoken today in places like India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Proto-Elamite Script

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Why was the Proto-Elamite script used for such a brief period, and then abandoned? This early Bronze Age writing system used by the oldest civilization of Iran over a large geographical area, but only for about two hundred years. It’s difficult for experts to even guess at what symbols may represent since they’re mostly abstract.