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Timeline BC |
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~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard  Hieroglyphs in inscriptions of a royal tomb; supposedly this is not the first but the first documented example of written cryptography
1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia
parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "atbash", which is nothing else than a reverse alphabet and one of the first famous methods of enciphering
4th century Aeneas Tacticus invents a form of beacons, by introducing a sort of water-clock
487 the Spartans introduce the so called "skytale" for sending short secret messages to and from the battle field
170 Polybius develops a system to convert letters into numerical characters, an invention called the Polybius Chequerboard.
50-60 Julius Caesar develops an enciphering method, later called the Caesar Cipher, shifting each letter of the alphabet an amount which is fixed before. Like atbash this is a monoalphabetic substitution.
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skytale
The skytale (pronunciation: ski-ta-le) was a Spartan tool for encryption. It consisted of a piece of wood and a leather-strip. Any communicating party needed exactly the same size wooden stick. The secret message was written on the leather-strip that was wound around the wood, unwound again and sent to the recipient by a messenger. The recipient would rewound the leather and by doing this enciphering the message.
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