THE SECTION ON CODES AND THEIR … SECTION ON CODES AND THEIR DECIPHERMENT IN QALQASHANDI'S SUBH AL-A'SHA By C. E. Bos WORTH ... The interest in non-Arabic scripts, in …

THE SECTION ON CODES AND THEIRDECIPHERMENT IN QALQASHANDI'S

SUBH AL-A'SHA

By C. E. Bos WORTH

I. INTRODUCTION

The subjects of cryptography and cryptanalysis in the Islamicworld have not so far been explored systematically. There doesnot seem to be any good work on the general history of crypto-graphy, and the articles on the subject in the standard encyclo-paedias contain no reference to this science as it developed inIslam. It is well known that codes were regularly used in ancientEgypt and in classical Greece and Rome. The scytale of theLacedaemonians, in which a message was written on a parchmentribbon which was wrapped around a cylindrical staff for purposesof writing and which could only be read by a recipient possessinga cylinder of exactly the same size, is an early example of atypical transposition cipher, but the Greeks also devised morescientific, numerical ciphers based on the substitution principle.Within the Semitic world, Jewish Talmudic scholars were keenlyinterested in secret systems of writing and in the use of numbersfor mystical and-occult purposes; such practices formed an in-tegral part of Kabbalistic studies.

All these strands met in the eclectic Islamic civilization as itdeveloped in the centuries after Muhammad, for the Arabs be-came heirs to the cultures, sciences and administrative practicesof the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Persia. More-over, Muslim scholarship came to concentrate on literary studiesin the widest sense, those concerned with all aspects of the use ofletters and numbers, to the comparative exclusion of the pictorialand plastic arts. Hence arose a pronounced taste for literary andnumerical conceits and artifices of all kinds, in particular, forriddles, acrostics, anagrams and rebuses, called geneticallymttammdt "things made obscure, hidden", and rumus^ "thingshinted at". There is a fair volume of Islamic literature on theseword- and number-games; several references are given in thebibliography to Moh. Bencheneb's JEZ1 article "al-Mu'amma".

The interest in non-Arabic scripts, in secret writing and in

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DECIPHERMENT IN QALQASHANDI'S SUBH AL-A'SHA

codes, was a further aspect of this literary taste. The study ofoutlandish, foreign scriptswasin part a by-product of the needto elucidate the obviously foreign loan-words in the Qur'an. Itwas also to a considerable extent the result of an incipientscientific, or rather, pseudo-scientific, curiosity, for such scriptsas the Hebrew, Syriac and South Arabian were believed to pro-vide a key to much magical and occult lore. P. Casanova, aftersurveying various alphabets current in the Islamic world for con-cealing magical information and formulae, concluded that, withone or two exceptions of purely Arabic invention, these were allof Hebrew origin.1 Massignon has surmised that the secretwriting of the Isma'lU manuscripts which were procured fromthe Yemen for the Ambrosiana Library in Milan should be con-nected with the South Arabian or HimyarMc alphabet.2 Finally,the study of foreign scripts became a diplomatic necessity, foralthough the strict letter of both the Qur'an and the SharVademanded a clean break between believers and unbelievers, theMuslims could not in practice avoid contacts and exchanges withsuch peoples as the Byzantines, Armenians and Franks, who hadtheir own alphabets. The great grammarian of the eighth century,al-Khalll b. Ahmad, is credited with being a pioneer authority oncodes and their solution; the feat of deciphering a code writtenin the Greek language is ascribed to him. One work from thefollowing century attests to the curiosity of some antdquarian-

1 "Alphabets magiques arabes", J.A. ser. u , xvm (1921), 51-2.2 Qted ibid. p. 46. Examples of this secret writing can be seen in E.

Griffini's article, "Die jungste ambrosianische Sammlung arahischer Hand-schriften", Z.D.M.G. LXDC (1915), pis. xvn and xvm, cf. pp. 80-8. Mycolleague Mr M. A. Ghul agrees that many of the characters here show aresemblance, in varying degrees of closeness, to the script of EpigraphicSouth Arabian. Stones bearing legends in the South Arabian script havebeen found by the thousand in what is now the Yemen and the AdenProtectorates, and there is nothing difficult in our assuming that the YemeniIsma'ills utilized the characters which they saw on local inscribed stones.Such a utilization does not, of course, imply a knowledge of the phoneticequivalents of die South Arabian characters, although certain Yemenischolars of the Islamic period, such as Nashwan b. Sa'Id al-Himyari (d. 573/1117), were aware of these (cf. bis Shams al-'ulum, ed. 'Azfmu'd-Dln Ahmad,G.MS. (1916), p. 52). Also, Professor C. F. Beckingham has drawn myattention to an important point: that the purpose of the cipher in the Ambro-siana Isma'Hl manuscripts seems not to have been concealment. The cipheris a simple substitution, which would not deceive any keen-witted outsider,and is in any case used only for the names of the Prophet, bis relatives andfamily, the Caliph 'All and the ShTl Imams; reverence rather than secrecymust have been the object here.

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minded scholars in the scripts and languages of the pre-Islamicancient world, despite the discouragement of such researches bysome theological circles. This is the Kitab sbauq al-mustabdm ftma'rifat rumit^ al-aqldm "Book of the frenzied devotee's desire tolearn about the riddles of ancient scripts" of Abu Bakr Ahmadb. 'All b. Wahshiyya an-Nabati or al-Kaldanl, completed in? 241/8 j 5. According to the Fibrist, Ibn Wahshiyya was noto-rious as a sorcerer, and Ibn an-Nadim gives the titles of severalof his books on magic1

Codes and secret scripts were of obvious practical use for thespecialist in some science or craft who desired to hide the arcanaof his profession from the gaze of the vulgar. Hence we findsecret scripts used for alchemical and medicinal formulae andrecipes. Wustenfeld deciphered one used in the anonymousGotha manuscript on the art of war which he edited and trans-lated as "Das Heerwesen der Muhammedaner", Abb. der Gesell.der Wiss. %u Gottingen, Phil.-Hist. CL, xxvi (1880), and which isprobably of fourteenth-century Egyptian origin. This secretscript is used to conceal the crucial ingredients of formulae formaking noxious compounds with naphtha, etc., which could behurled into besieged strongholds.2 Similarly, the extremistIsma'ill Shf a were compelled publicly to adopt an attitude oftaqiyya, prudent dissimulation, and to conceal their writings froma hostile outside world. Their conspiratorial methods and theirhopes of attaining gnosis through a knowledge of the mysticalpowers of numbers, led to an extensive cultivation by them of thesciences of secret writing and numerology; several of these ideaspassed from them to later Persian sects like the Hurufls, Shaikhlsand Babis.

As the civilization of the Abbasid Caliphate and its successorsin the provinces rose to its apogee, the use of codes for admini-strative and diplomatic purposes became widespread. The abilityto handle and decipher them became a prime requisite for thesecretaries in the Swans, and the historical sources of the tenthand eleventh centuries provide many references to their use: as

1 Fibrist (Cairo, 1348/1929-30), pp. 433, 504-5. Qalqashandl quotes IbnWahshiyya in Subb al-a'sba, n, 180, bat only as an authority on agricultureand botany and as the author of a Kitab al-faldba an-nabatrgya. The K. sbauqal-mustabam was edited and translated by J. Hammer as Ancient alphabets andhieroglyphic characters explained; with an account of the Egyptian priests, theirclasses, initiation and sacrifices (London, 1806).

1 "Eine arabische Geheimschrift entzinert", Nacbricbten der Gesell. derWiss. Z" Gottingen (1879), pp. 349-5 5.

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the unity of the Baghdad Caliphate broke down, communicationsbeeame-more uncertain-and hostile-governors in-the provincesarose, so that the despatch of an en clair message to a distantaddressee was often risky. In later centuries, the use of codes andsecret writing was especially practised by the Ottomans, and theuse of codes based on long-established principles has lasted in theMediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds almost to the presentcentury. J. A. Decourdemanche quotes the letter of a Muslimspy to the Regent of Algiers at the time of the abortive expeditionof Charles HI of Spain against Algiers in 177 j . This is written inSpanish, but includes details of the Spanish military and navaldispositions written in the secret script used especially in theLevant and Maghrib and known in Turkey as Mtsirli "Egyp-tian", in Egypt as Sbdmi "Syrian" and in Syria as Tadmuri"Palmyrene".1

The Egypt of the Mamelukes was the land of an ancient civiliz-ation, whose monuments were still conspicuously visible andwhose people were considered by the Muslims to have cultivatedextensively the esoteric and magical arts. Moreover, the Mame-lukes possessed a numerous and influential official bureaucracy,interested in the practice and theory of insbd' in all its aspects.The international ramifications of Mameluke diplomacy, whosescope extended from the Christian powers of the western Mediter-ranean to the Mongol Khans and Timurid Sultans in Iran, SouthRussia and Central Asia, required the Mameluke secretaries tohave a knowledge of such diverse scripts as the Latin and theUighur. All these factors contributed to a keen interest in theMameluke territories in codes, secret writing and foreign scripts.Hence it is not surprising that Qalqashandi in his great manualfor secretaries, the Subb al-a'sbdfi sind*at al-insba*, completed in814/1412, devotes sections both to cryptography and crypt-analysis (ta'miya and ball al-mutarjam) and, more briefly, to sym-bolic actions and deeds containing hidden allusions (rumu% andisbdrdt) (ed. Muh. 'Abd ar-Rasul Ibrahim, 14 vols. (Cairo, 1331-40/1913-22), EX, 229-51). This passage is briefly resumed by W.Bjorkman in his indispensable guide to the Subb al-a'sbd, Beitrdgevpr Gesebicbte des Staatskan^lei im islamischen Agypten, Hamburg-ische Universitat. Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Auslands-kunde, xxvm (1928), 143. A translation of QalqashandTssection on codes ( = rx, 229-48) is given below; certain passages

1 "Note sur quatre syst&mes turqucs de notation num&dque secrete",J.A. &cr. 9, xiv (1899), 267-9.

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dealing with unoriginal, grammatical explanations or with therepetitious technical process of cryptanalysis, are summarized.

In this section, Qalqashandi deals first with chemical processesfor secret writing. He then passes to cryptography proper, dis-tinguishing two methods for enciphering a message: first, byputting it into an obscure or archaic script which is known onlyto a few specialists, and secondly, by inventing one's ownalphabet of arbitrary characters or symbols. Within this secondmethod, he enumerates two forms of transposition ciphers, thatis those where the normal position of the units making up theoriginal message is altered, and then various forms of substitutionciphers, that is those where the units making up the originalmessage retain their relative positions but change their identities.As the text says, the possibilities for codes based on this lastprinciple are limitless—one may substitute other letters, numbers,pictographic signs, etc.

Qalqashandi then moves on to the topic of cryptanalysis, howcodes are broken down. He is concerned here only with codeswritten in Arabic, "the noblest and most exalted of all lan-guages". The principles which should be used for deciphermentare enumerated. Very important is the general principle of letter-frequency within the message. The other principles require thatthe solver should have an exhaustive knowledge of the Arabiclanguage, its phonology arid its characteristic word-patterns. Intheir investigations of the mu'arrabdt, foreign words borrowedinto Arabic, the Arab philologists had made observations of con-siderable acuteness and importance on the phenomena of phoneticchange as between Persian and Arabic and as between some otherSemitic languages and Arabic, and on the compatibility or in-compatibility of various sounds within the Arabic language.1

These deductions of the grammarians are applied in Qalqa-shandi's text to the identification of Arabic word-patterns withina coded message. Thus, he says, two laryngeal consonants nevercome together in an Arabic word, except that the weakly articu-lated bd' may follow a laryngeal when it is a servile letter, or mayfollow 'ain in the basic form of a word; certain pairs of letterscan never occur at the beginning of a word; and so on. Twoexamples of how to solve a code are given; broadly speaking, oneproceeds from the shortest words upwards, bearing in mind the

1 See the succinct survey of L. Kopf, " The treatment of foreign words inmediaeval Arabic lexicology", Studies in Islamic History and Civilisation,Scripta Hierosolymitana, DC, ed. U. Heyd (Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 191-205.

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principle of letter-frequency and the characteristic combinationsof "letters in Arabic wordsr

The greater part of Qalqashandi's section on codes and theirsolution is taken directly from another, slightly earlier writer ofthe Mameluke period, one Taj ad-Din 'All b. Muhammad ath-Tha'alibi al-Mausili, called Ibn ad-Duraihim (712-62/1312-61).This Shafi'I 'dlim held various teaching and official posts inMameluke Syria and Egypt. According to Brockelmann, his onlyextant work is a theological treatise, the Ghayat al-maghnam ffl-ism al-a\am (G.A.L. 11, 214, suppl. n, 213), but Hajjl Khalifa (ed.Fliigel, vi, 30, no. 12603) names him as the author of the Miftdhal-kunu\fiiddh al-marmu\, described as a commentary on his workin verse on codes. Qalqashandl does not explicitly mentionthis work, but it must obviously be the one by Ibn ad-Duraihimwhich he so frequently cites (cf. Bjorkman, op. tit. p. 79).

In conclusion, the writer may mention that he has found use-ful two concise, modem works on codes and their decipherment:L. D. Smith, Cryptography, the Stience of Secret Writing, and H. F.Gaines, Cryptanalysis, a Study of Ciphers and their Solution (bothDover Books, New York, 1955 and 1956).

II. TRANSLATION OF TEXT

ix, 229 Fasl 8 [of Bab 2 of Maqdla 4] concerning the concealment of secretmessages within letters1

This is when necessity compels, because an enemy places some obstacleor similar thing between the sender and the addressee, e.g. between tworulers or two other persons. [It is used] when circumventory actions{mulatfafdt) are of no avail, either because of interceptory ambushes(li-darar ar-rasd) or because of thorough probes into all letters comingfrom either of the two parties corresponding. These [sc. secret mes-sages] are of two kinds:

Nau' 1, what pertains to the process of writing;it bos two subdivisions:1

Darb 1, what pertains to the materials used for writingI.e. one writes with something which is not immediately visible. When

1 This fasl comes in the second bob, "On the technical procedures(musfalabdt) used in correspondence by the secretaries in eastern and westernlands and in the Egyptian territories, ranging over the whole period fromthe appearance of Islam up to our own time", of the fourth maqdla, " Onforms of correspondence (mukatabat)".

* Nau' 2 (pp. 249-51) deals with " Symbolic actions and those containinghidden allusions (ar-rumuz wa'l-isbdrdt), which are not to be included withwriting and written messages ".

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it reaches the addressee, he applies something to the letter in accordancewith what he and the sender have previously agreed on, or else he maybrush it with something or hold it in front of a fire, etc.

Various ways of doing this are recorded:(1) One may write on the paper with fresh milk in which sal

ammoniac (nausbddur) has been dissolved. The writing is not thenvisible on the paper, but when it is placed in front of a fire, it appears.

(2) One may also write on the paper with water in which onionshave been crushed. The writing is not then visible, but when it too isplaced in front of a fire, it appears.

230 (3) One may write on paper or on any other writing material onechooses with an aqueous solution of copper sulphate (gof). The writingis not then visible, but when it is brushed over with a solution of oak-galls pounded up in water, it appears.

(4) One may write with alum (sbabb) dissolved in rainwater on paperwhich has not been sized (gbair al-munasbsba). Then [the addressee] putsit in water or brushes it with it, and when it dries, the writing appearson it.

(5) One may write with the gall of a tortoise {mararatas-sulbafdt\ andthe writing on it will be visible by night but not by day.

(6) One may take a preparation of black lemon (? Umim aswad) andcolocynth roots fried with olive oil, in equal proportions, and thenpulverise them altogether. A paste made from yolk of eggs should beadded to it, and then one can write with it on any object one desires.After a while, hair grows in place of the writing. This is one of themost remarkable secret processes. When one wants to send a messengerwith a letter to a distant place, this procedure is followed, and when thehair grows, the writing can be read.

Darb 2, what pertains to the written scriptThe message may be in a special form of writing (qalam) which thesender and addressee have agreed on beforehand and which is notknown to anyone else who may perhaps peruse it. This is called acryptogram or code (ta'mtya); contemporary usage also terms this pro-cedure ball al-mutarjam, "the solving of what requires interpretation".Concerning this term, one view is that tarjama is an expression for theuncovering of what is written in a code, and from the same root istarjuman, meaning someone who translates from some unknown tongueinto a known one. The word hall, "solving" is also allowable1 in thiscontext, since the [basic] trvqning of ball is "the loosening of a knot".Thus one mpans by "the solving of what requires interpretation (ballal-mutarjam) the same as "the interpretation of what requires inter-

1 The text hasjatipaUu "is allowable ", but Mr M. A. Ghul, who has beenkind enough to make several suggestions on the translation of the text,suggests that one might also zeaAjmbalu "may be ascribed".

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pretation" (tarjamat al-mutarjam) or "the solving of what requitessolution" {hall al-hall). If it were simply to be explained as "the un-covering of what is in code" {kashf al-mu'ammd), this would be muchmore convenient and nearer to the intended sense.

231 There are two basic points to the practice of cryptography:The first basic point is, how the cryptogram is made up.Know that every cryptogram may be such in relationship to each

person's particular ignorance of the different scripts. Thus a passagein the Arabic language but written in a non-Arabic script, such as theGreek or Hebrew ones, etc., with the letters of that non-Arabic scriptcorresponding to those of the Arabic, or else such a message in Arabicbut written in a system of writing which has previously been made up,again with the letters corresponding to those of Arabic, is a cryptogramto an Arab. In the same way, a message may be a cryptogram to anon-Arab, such as a Greek, etc., who does not know the Arabic scriptin the Arabic system of writing; and so forth.

People may use two methods for putting a message in code:The first method is that it should be written in one of the ancient

systems of writing no longer in current use and known now by onlya few individuals, provided that the system of writing fits the languagein which one wishes to send the message.

Ibn ad-Duraihim has said that the language with the fewest lettersin its alphabet is the Mongol with only 17;' and the one with the most,the Armenian, with 36.* Then he goes on to say that the Turkish has

1 At the time Ibn ad-Duraihim wrote, the Mongol emperors in Khitawere using the so-called " square " or pP'ags-pa script of 3 o characters, devisedat Khubiki's command to replace the old Uighur alphabet and officiallyintroduced in 1269 (cf. N. Poppe, A grammar of written Mongolian (Wies-baden, 1954), pp. }-6)> But it is unlikely that this script, which did not provepopular and which was only in general use in flhina and Mongolia, wasknown to Ibn ad-Duraihim. It is clearly the Uighur alphabet which is meanthere, the one most widely used by the Mongols when they first entered theIslamic world; the ability to handle correspondence in Uighur script was arequisite not only in the Timurid chanceries, where its use lasted longest, butalso in those of the Mamelukes and Ottomans, until the end of the fifteenthcentury. Although earlier forms of the Uighur script (sc. those used inUighuria before Islam appeared in Central Asia) had more than the 17characters which Ibn ad-Duraihim mentions, the script as used in theeleventh century and after by Turkish and other Central Asian peoples didin fact have 17 or 18 characters. Mahmud Kashgharl says that the " Turkish "alphabet has 17 letters, but actually gives 18 (Dia>an lugbat at-turk, facs.text 7-8, tr. B. Atalay (Ankara, 1939-41), 1, 8-10; cf. Brockelmann, Ost-turkiscbe Grammatik der islamischen Litteraturspracben Mittelasiens (Leiden,1954), PP- 20-1).

2 Ibn ad-Duraihim's information relates to the Armenian alphabet as itwas before the twelfth century. Thereafter, two further characters came intouse, 5 ( < an old diphthong at/) and ft (for rendering the sound in foreign loan

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20, and likewise the Persian, except that Persian has three letters whichdo not appear in the Turkish, sc. bd\ fa' and ddl (? read Sal),1 andTurkish has three which do not appear in Persian, sc. sad, fa' and qdf1

words, the unvoiced labiodental fricative being absent from the phonologyof Armenian proper), making a total alphabet of 38 letters (cf. H. Jensen,Altarmeniscbt Grammatik (Heidelberg, 1959), 8, § 15 (£)).

1 I take these zo letters of the Persian alphabet to be as follows: a/if, bd\td',jlm, kbd\ ddl, dbdl, rd\ ^dy, sin, sbin, gbain,fd\ kdf, lam, aAm, nun, wdw,bd',yd'. The letters peculiar to Persian, pd, cbim, ^bd and gdf are subsumedunder their nearest Arabic equivalents, bd',jim, %dy and kdf. It is only fromthe fourteenth century onwards that these two sets of letters begin to beorthographically distinguished in manuscripts. For instance, the manuscriptof Rawandi's Rabat as-sudurused by Iqbal for his edition dates from 635/1238,and the letters here are quite undififerentiated; but in the Vatican manuscriptdated 733/1332 of AsadI Tusi's Lugbat-i Furs—a good locus probans, for onewould expect in a lexicographical work as careful a differentiation of lettersas possible—-pa and cbim are still only rarely written, although %bd is usuallydistinguished from \dy (cf. P. Horn, "Asadl's neupersisches WorterbuchLughat-i Furs", Abb. der Gesell. der Wiss. Z<H Gottingen, PhiL-Hist KX, N.F. 1(1897), no. 8, p. 10). Gdfand kdf axe not always distinguished even at thepresent day. It may also be noted that certain of the consonants peculiar toArabic, in particular, the emphatics sdd and td\ were occasionally used,apparently arbitrarily, in the spelling of certain true Persian words (cf. Hornin Grundrifi der iraniscben Pbilologie, 1, 2, § iv, "Neupersische Schriftsprache",pp. 12-13).

* I put forward tentatively the following as the Turkish alphabet possiblyintended here: alif, bd', td\fitn, kbd\ ddl, rd\ xdy, sin, sbin, sdd, td'', gbain, qdf,kdf, Idm, mim, nun, wdw,yd\ The difficulty is, of course, to know exactly whatIbn ad-Duraihim meant by "Turkish". Since he was a writer of the Mame-luke period and, as has been noted above, p. 22, held several official postsunder the Mamelukes, I consider that the most likely form here is the westernTurkish of the Qipchaqs, for the military personnel of the early Mamelukestate was largely drawn from this ethnic group. We possess several grammarsand glossaries of the western Turkish of this period, such as the anonymousTurkish-Arabic glossary edited by Houtsma and dating from 643/1245, thegrammar of the Spanish writer Abu Hayyan al-Ghamati (d. 745/1344) andthe anonymous al-Qaxvdmn al-kulliyya li-dabt al-lugba at-turkiyya (written inEgypt in the opening years of the fifteenth century). The information de-ducible from them on the orthography of contemporary Turkish is variedand not always consistent. One difficulty is the use of the Arabic emphaticconsonants to indicate the proximity in Turkish of back vowels. In thisconnexion Omeljan Pritsak states, on the evidence of such texts as thosequoted above, "Die arabischen emphatischen Buchstaben s, d, t wurden furdie velaren Abarten eingesetzt, ebenso die Buchstaben q und g fur diekiptschakischen q and y" ("Die Mamluk-Kiptschakisch", in Pbilologiaeturcicae fundamenta, ed. J. Deny, K. Gronbech, H. Scheel and Z. V. Togan, 1(Wiesbaden, 1959), 77). The consonant dad, however, did not establish itselfin the orthography of purely Turkish words in Ottoman usage (cf. Deny,Grammairt dt la tongue torque (dialeete osmanti) (Paris, 1920), pp. 14-21), and

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Hebrew and Syriac have 11 letters, comprising those of the Arabicabjad system-lying between ^Wând_^zr<wArf._The_alphabet_of_theancient Greeks (al-Yimdni) and the Byzantines (ar-Rumi) has 24 letters,but they also have another system of writing with 30 letters.1 Coptichas 32 letters.2 He mentions that all these systems have, in the con-vention of their alphabets, their letters disjoined from each other, with

232 the exception of Arabic, Mongol and Syriac, whose letters include somewhich may be joined and some which must be separated; the separatedones in the Syriac alphabet are the same as those of the Arabic3 Thesystems of writing of former peoples, such as those of the Byzantines,the Franks, etc., which are well-attested, are well-known, and there isno need to give any illustration here.

The second method is that a man should himself invent an entirelynew system of writing and make up the characters for it. Ibn

indeed it is doubtful whether the use of sad and to" to indicate back vowelswas general in western Turkish in the fourteenth century; until a date laterthan this, the non-emphatics sin and /<*' were still used in words with back-vowel harmony.

1 This alternative system of writing of the Greeks, with its 30 letters, ispresumably some form of the Cyrillic alphabet, which developed from theGreek uncial one (cf. D. Diringer, The Alphabet (London, 1948), pp. 475 ff.).St Cyril's original alphabet had 43 characters to represent the rich phonologyof Old Slavonic, but it is probable that Ibn ad-Duraihim knew of one of theversions of it used in the Balkans in his own time; by the year of his death,1361, the Ottomans were already masters of much of Thrace and in contactwith such powers as the Serbian empire of Stephen Dushan and his suc-cessor. In any case, there are indications that the Muslim peoples of thewestern part of the Eurasian steppe—from whom the Mameluke state drewmuch of its military personnel—had long known about the Cyrillic alphabetThe Ghurid historian of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Fakhrad-Dln Mubarakshah, seems to allude to it in his Ta'rikb, ed. £. DenisonRoss (London, 1927), p. 46: "The Khazars also have a script, which is con-nected with (? stems from, mansub) that of the Rus. A group of the Rumlswho live near them use this script too; they are called the Rum-RSs. It iswritten from left to right, and the letters are not joined to each other. It has21 letters and no more, in the following order: [22 letters of the Arabicalphabet are actually given]."

2 The basic alphabet of Coptic has in fact 31 characters, of which 24derive from the Greek alphabet and 7 from the Demotic script. Ibn ad-Duraihim's information is, however, correct in so far as an extra characterappears in the Achmlmic dialect of Coptic, this character being a differentia-tion of the laryngeal bori in order to give an equivalent of the Egyptian band b sounds. See G. Steindorff, Lebrbueb der koptiscben Grammatik (Chicago,19J 0» PP- 9» «J. § l6» I9. § *4-

3 Of the seven letters of the Syriac alphabet which are not joined to thesucceeding letter, only four, ddlatb, wow, vâin and risb, in fact share thisfeature with the corresponding Arabic letters.

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ad-Duraihim has said that people have devised various systems here.These include:

(1) He may substitute a certain letter for another one wherever*itoccurs, this being the system of writing known as qummi. In it theysubstitute for every letter of the Arabic alphabet another letter, e.g.kdf for mim and vice versa, a/if for warn and vice versa, ddl for ray andvice versa, sin for 'aitt and vice versa, fa" for yd' and vice versa. Thus"Muhammad" is written as k.t.k.r, "'All" as s.b.f, "Mas'ud" ask.'.sdr, and so forth. These substitutions have been made into a lineof verse, where each letter is followed by its substitute:"

Kam au battim sild lahu dor sa1** ft box kbasb" gbadd" tbaj tadfaq

(2) He may reverse the letters of the word and write "Muhammad"as d.m.b.m and "'All" asy.l.'.

(3) He may reverse the first letter of the word with the second and soon right through the message, so that "Muhammad akhu 'All" be-comes b.m.d.m kbd *.w.y.l, and similarly with other variations.

(4) He may give the letters their numerical value in the systemwhereby the Arabic alphabet may be used as a system of numeration(al-fummal); thus "Muhammad" becomes 40 + 8+40 + 4, and thecryptogram is made to look like a list of figures.

(5) Instead of the single letter corresponding to the number, he maywrite more than one letter [but adding up to that number]; this makesthe cryptogram more difficult. Thus he may write "Muhammad" as li

233 bit Ji 'J, since ldm+yd' = 40 = mim, the original letter; bd'+wdw =8 = bd'; ldm+yd' = 40 = the second mim; and alif+jim = 4 = ddl.This amounts to writing m.b.m.d. If one wishes, other letters can beused, so long as they add up to the number of the original letter.

(6) He may substitute for each letter the name of a man or some-thing like that.

(7) He may set down instead of the letters the 28 lunar mansions inthe abjad order of the alphabet, making alifthe two horns of the Ram,bd' the Ram's belly, y'/w the Pleiades, and so on till the end, so that theFish's belly becomes the gbain oidaqagb. Sometimes the letters may beplaced in a certain order based on the names of countries, fruits,trees, etc., or drawings of birds and other living creatures may be usedto form coded messages; the possibilities are innumerable.1 However,

1 Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Yahya as-§ull (d. 335/946-7) in the briefsection on at-tarjama fl'l-mukdtaba in his manual for secretaries, the Adahal-kuttab (ed. Muh. Bahjat al-Athad [Cairo, 1341/1922-3], pp. 186-7), givesas examples of encoding procedures two of the methods mentioned here byIbn ad-Duraihim. Thus, he says, one may substitute the names of birds forletters of the alphabet, making alif= "dove", hi* = "fidcon", /«' = "spar-row ", etc; or one may equate the 29 letters of die alphabet with the 28 lunarmansions, adding to diem for this purpose the name of the moon itself.

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most of the exponents of the science of cryptography, when they sub-stitute-various symbols for the letters,devise for them asystem-ofwriting in which these symbols are divided up from each other ac-cording to the normal order of the letters of the alphabet (buruf al-mu'jam) [sc. not in the abjad order of the system previously mentioned].They do this by setting down the letters of the alphabet and thenputting underneath each one a symbol or sign (sbakl) which must bequite distinct from the original letter. Then, whenever that letter occursin the passage, he writes the symbol, taking care to avoid errors.Finally^ he marks off each word by a stroke, point, space, circle, etcFormer generations usually made a letter doubled by tasbdid into twoseparate letters; at the present time, they make it just one letter. Thefollowing is a diagram of the symbols of a code which came to theSultanal administration from certain well-wishers in Baghdad; [it isgiven as a typical example,] from which other systems may be imagined.

[Here follows in the text an alphabet of letters and symbols, mainly,though not entirely, composed of the letters of the Arabic alphabet orcombinations of them.]

234 The second basic point is, how the cryptogram may be solved; this isthe object and result of the section.

The would-be solver must not only have a keen intuitive faculty anda sharp intellect, but must also know the language in which the crypto-gram whose solution he desires is written. He must further know thenumber of letters in the alphabet of the language concerned—thus it iswell known that the Arabic alphabet has 28—and must know theletters which appear in every language and those which never occur insome languages, as has been previously mentioned.

Amongst the languages current in this country [sc. MamelukeEgypt], the one most frequently resorted to and the one commonlyused for speech, is Arabic, the noblest and most exalted of all lan-guages.

The person who applies himself to solving codes in Arabic needs tobear two principles in mind:

Tbe first principle is knowledge of the basis (uss) on which the processof solution rests. There are seven points which are relevant here:

(1) That he should know the characteristic combinations of letters(maqddir al-buritf) from which the word in Arabic is composed.

Know that Arabic speech comprises words formed of a single letter,like qi, the command "Take care!" and V, the command "Keep inmindl". Then there are words formed from two letters.indudingverbalforms like qum, the command "Stand up!" and kul, the command" Eat!"; particles like min,fi, rubba, bal, baJ, etc.; indeclinable nouns likedin, dbd, man and kam; and combinations of pronouns and prepositions,such as bika and labu. Then there are words formed from three, four andfive letters, comprising particles, verbs and nouns. Lastly, one musttake into account the so-called "servile" letters, contained in the

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mnemonic bawiyat al-simdn, together with three others, fa', the pre-23 5 positional bd' and the Jkdfused in comparison and for the second person

conjunct pronoun. According to the computations of the secretaries,these may be used to give a word of 14 letters, as when you speak to twomen who have been laying out a garden, "Have you then prepared itas places of repose for yourselves?" (afaJimustan%abdtikumd a'dadtu-mdbdT).

Ibn ad-Duraihim has said: There is no word in Arabic speech whichis originally quadriliteral or quinqueliteral and which does not containone of the lingual {dbalaqi) letters such as 1dm, nun and'wdw, or labial(sbafawf) letters like/a', mim and bd\ apart from a very few exceptions,like 'asjad, a name for gold.'

He goes on to say: The mawmmn number of letters which Arabicnouns can have before the addition of servile letters is five, and wordslike 'andalib are exceptional;2 and the maximum number which verbscan have is four. There are no originally quinqueliteral words in theQur'an except for foreign words like "Ibrahim". No letter can berepeated in one word more than five times, as in one example we haveseen, kukak™ ka-kukakikum* [this being] the plural of kukka "a largevessel", like 'ukka pi. 'ukak; and as in the expression (lacuna here inMS.) ka-ka'kika, which has four kdfs.

•(2) That he should know which letters are never found together, i.e.never come together in one word.

35-7 [Here follows a long exposition of some of the principles enunciatedby the grammarians concerning the combination of certain letters ortheir appearance within the same word. Thus it is pointed out thatwhen Jim and qdf occur in the same word, as iajurmuq, manjanlq orsanjaq, the word must be foreign and not pure Arabic; mim does notcombine with bd' 01 fa' in the basic form of a word, except in fam,whose original form is in any case fawaJb; the laryngeal (balqi) lettersmay not come together, except for the bd' when it is a servile letterforming a suffix or when it occasionally follows 'ain as in 'abd and 'abr.]

237 (3) That he should know the letters which only rarely come together

1 This information, in common with much of the ensuing grammaticaldetail, goes back to al-KhaM, who wrote in the introduction to his Kitabal-rin thztdbalaqi and sbafavi letters are easy to produce and therefore becomecommon in speech patterns; hence no true quadriliterals or quinqueliteralsare free from them (quoted in J. A. Haywood, Arabic lexicography (Leiden,i960), pp. 31-2).

a Text queried by the editor. The word 'andatlb gave trouble to the lexi-cographers, because they were unable to decide whether the MM* as well asthejvJ' was vp'ida. Most authorities, however, took the mm to be radical; cf.Usan al-arab, xm, $07-8, s.v. y/'.n.i.l.

^ This phrase has been supplied by the editor, there being a lacuna in themanuscript; but he states that he has been unable to find the word in thedictionaries and surmises that it may be a colloquialism.

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in one word, such as the c6mbination of sin with shin in sbis', shin withK& '** m -sba^r,-aad-rd~with lamas in ward.

Know that a single letter may often be repeated in the same word,as in dahdah, tahtah, nahnab, kashas, habhab, jaljal, khalkbdl, sba'sba'a,%a'%a', daghdagb, bagbbagb, na'na', 'as'as, yu'az?, gbaugbd', dahdah, kbaukb,and such like.

(4) That he should know which letters may be placed before otherletters and which may not. Thus tbd' may not precede shin. Ddl may notprecede^,J<J</or/a';this can be demonstrated from the fact thatwhenjtheterm of Persian origin] mubana\ was Arabized,the \dy was changed intoa sin, so that they say mubandis and bandasa. Dbdl may not precede jZor, sin,shin or 'ain. Hence when they axabaedfaludbqf from the original Persian,they saidfdliidbaq. Shin may not be preceded by qay, sin, or sad. Td' maynot precede kdf in the basic form of a word. Sin may not precede ddlexcept in rare cases like saddb. Dbdl may not precede ddl except inrare cases like the command dbudal-ghanam "Drive away the sheep 1".

23 8 (5) That he should know which letters never occur at the beginningof a word and are then followed by certain other letters, such as Jim,which may not be followed by td', sad, dad or gbain. In regard to thevrordjiss, this is an arabized foreign word.

(6) That he should know that no letter may be repeated at thebeginning of a word except the following ten: kdf, lam, mint, nun, td',alij, bd\ wdw, qafaudyd'. These are contained in the mnemonic kulluman tdba wuqiya. Of these, yd' occurs the least often.

(7) That he should know which letters are used most frequently in thelanguage, and then those coming next in frequency, down to those leastused.

Know that the frequency of usage in Arabic, in the light of whata perusal of the Noble Qur'an reveals, is as follows: aHf, lam, mim,yd',wdw, nun, bd\ rd',fd', qdf, ddl, dbdl, Idm-alif, hd'Jim, sad, kbd', sbin, dad,Zdy, tbd', fd', gbain, %?.

[Mnemonics are given for the groups of the most frequent, moderatelyfrequent and least frequent letters.]

239 Ibn ad-Duraihim has said: In non-Qur'anic writings, the frequencymay be different from this, just as both poetry and prose may be com-posed without the use of the letter alij or without any of the dottedletters or without any of the undotted letters or with only a limitednumber of words; or a composition may be made up of a limitednumber of words which do not use up all the letters.

The second principle is how one proceeds, by trial and error (bi'l-hads), to solve the code.

Ibn ad-Duraihim has said: When you want to solve a message whichyou have received in code, begin first of all by counting the letters, andthen count how many times each symbol is repeated and set down thetotals individually. If the person devising the code has been verythorough and has concealed the word-divisions in the body of the

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message, then the first thing to be worked out is the symbol whichdivides up the words (al-fdtila). To do this, you take a letter and workon the assumption that the next letter is the word-divider. Then you goall through the message with it, having regard for the possible com-binations of letters of which the words may be composed, as has beenpreviously explained. If it fits, [then all right]; if not, you take thenext letter after the second one. If that fits, [then all right]; if not, youtake the next letter after that, and so on, until you are able to ascertainthe division of the words. Next, look which letters occur mostfrequently in the message, and compare this with the pattern of letter-frequency previously mentioned. When you see that one letter occursin the message more often than the rest, then assume that it is a/if; thenassume that the next most frequent is lam. The accuracy of your conjec-ture should be confirmed by die fact that in a majority of contexts, lamfollows a/if. Then see whether the message contains a single, isolatedletter; assume that this is ldm-alif. Then the first words which you try towork out in the message are the two-lettered ones, through estimatingtibe most feasible combinations of their letters (bi-taqrib burufihd), untilyou are sure you have discovered something correct in them; then lookat their symbols and write down the equivalents by them [whenever theyoccur in the message]. Apply the same principle to the message's three-lettered words until you are sure you have got something, then write outthe equivalents [all through the message]. Apply the same principle tothe four- and five-lettered words, according to the previous procedure.Whenever there is any doubt, posit two or three or more conjectures andwrite each one down until it becomes certain from another word. When-

240 ever something falls into place from this, write down the rest on thesame analogy. When you observe that a certain letter precedes a/if andlam at the beginning of a word, assume that it is probably bd", fa" or kdf.

He says: To help the beginner, each word of the message should bewritten distinct and separate from the rest. One should also use poetryfor it and not prose, because the metre will help the beginner to workout some of the letters, like the bd' of the feminine ending, the quiescenttd' of the feminine ending [of the perfect aspect of the verb], the td' ofthe first person [of the perfect verb again] and the quiescent letterwhich can only be one of the "defective" letters used in speech [se. thewdw and yd' when they occur in diphthongs], etc. Then he gives anexample of this. Suppose, he says, you are faced with the followinglines written in this system of writing:

140-4 [Here is given the text of a message in code. Except for two char-acters which are the bd' and lam of the normal Arabic alphabet, all the20 characters of the code are symbols of apparently arbitrary invention.The method of solution is now given at length. One begins by count-ing the frequency of each symbol, and then the procedure laid down inthe previous pages is followed. Word-frequency count gives a/if and/am. A single-letter word must be ldm-alif. Where this last occurs as

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DECIPHERMENT IN QALQASHANDI'S SUBH AL-A€SHA

the second letter in a two-letter word, one must have a word likebildjbaldrtala^jalaêXc. Where we have a two-letter-word with a/ifas-the second letter, we most probably have either mdjmd' otyd (the com-bination nd = nd'a being comparatively rare); where we have a three-letter word in which the first two letters are the same and the third iseither mim otyd', the only possible word is/aft. In a word of the forma/if+/dm+X+X+a/if+ Y, the only feasible equivalent for Xin thesetwo positions is mim; when Yis later found to be td', the word emergesas al-mamdt. The process of conjecture and the elimination of possi-bilities continues until the final text emerges as two lines of verse andthe subjoined signature of the author, 'All b. ad-Duraihim al-Mausili.]

t4 The solution is worked out in this sort of manner. But notice theletters of this message and the fact that they comprise only 21 [sic] innumber, and 8 of them are completely lacking. When you bear in mindthe information about the frequency of letters in the Mighty Book,which I have set before you, you will see that these 8 missing lettersare those coming at the end of the frequency list, all sharing the sameplace, none of them falling either in front of or behind their assignedplaces. This, however, is pure chance: a letter may be somewhat mis-placed from the position it has been assigned in the above-mentionedfrequency list. In this message, j J ' happens to be more frequent thanmim, and fa' more frequent than mim and mm, and bd' also comes beforemim. But the basic requisites are a knowledge of the feasible combina-tions of the letters, a trial-and-error process in finding out the words anda use of the indications given by the general context of the message.

Let us give a further example, in order that the various methods forsolution may be made clear:

-8 [Here follows a second example from Ibn ad-Duraihim, this timerather longer and using 25 of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. Solu-tion proceeds along the same lines as in the previous example. Onebegins by making a frequency-count, but there are pitfalls here. Thetwo most frequent characters must not here equal a/if and lam in thatorder, since the second most frequent character nowhere in the messagefollows the most frequent one, i.e. giving the frequent combination ofthe definite article a/- (the combination Idm-alifis treated here, as else-where in Qalqashandi's exposition, as a single, separate consonant). Athree-letter word beginning with two Idms can only be li'lldbi. A five-letter word is therefore ' .l.b.X.d, where the unknown fourth letter isthe next most frequently found letter after a/if and Jam, and is probablytherefore mim, but possibly also mm. However, the tact that a two-letterword X.d occurs with the same unknown character as the first lettermakes it almost certainly the mim of mdjmd', and the five-letter wordmust be albamd (for albama "He has inspired" in pause). When mimis the first letter of a two-letter word and the other letter is the mostfrequently found of the six possibilities, the letter must be nun, givingman. The next most frequent letter occurs more often than not at the

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beginning of a word before a/if 2nd lam, and is therefore the wao> of thecopula. In this way one works out the remaining letters by a process ofelimination, until the message finally appears as four lines of verse.] *

248 I [sc. Qalqashandi] say: something which may be considered as anappendage to this process of devisingcryptograms with secret scripts,is what Ibn Shith relates in his Ma'dlim al-kitaba "Signposts in thesecretary's art".» He relates that a certain king ordered his secretary towrite a letter from him to one of his courtiers, blandishing him andsetting his mind at rest, in order that he might seize him wheneveropportunity arose. It happened that the secretary and the addresseewere friends; so the secretary wrote the message as he was commanded,not deviating one jot from the usual epistolary form, except that whenhe wrote at the end, "If God, He is exalted, wills", he placed a shaddaover the nm of in "if". When the courtier read it, he realized that thiswas no meaningless act on the secretary's part, and he set about cogitat-ing over its secret interpretation and significance. It dawned on himthat the secretary was alluding to God's words "Indeed, the assemblyare conspiring together to kill you",2 so he was on his guard and tookprecautions. The king got to know about his wary attitude, and sus-pected the secretary of having added something to the message whichwould convey what the king was planning. So he summoned him andasked him about it, and ordered him to write out the message exactlyas he had written it, without deviating from the original by one jot.The secretary wrote it out without changing any part of his version,even putting in the shadda on the nun. When the king read it and noticedthzsbadda, he angrily taxed the secretary with it, saying," What did youmean by that ? ". He replied," I was alluding to God's words' Indeed, theassembly are conspiring together to kill you'". The king was pleasedby this, and forgave him because of his truthfulness with him (orperhaps, "because of his faithfulness to his friend", li-sidqibi iyyabu).*

1 The Ma'dlim al-kitaba wa magbanim al-isaba of 'Abd ar-Rahman b. 'All b.Shith al-UmawI al-Qurashl (? al-QudsI) (d. 625/1228) was a major source forthe $ubb al-a'sba; see Bjdrkman's lengthy analysis of the work in Beitrage ûrGescbiebte der Staatskamjei in islamitcben Agypten, pp. 34-6. The Ma'dlim al-kitaba was edited by al-Khuri Qustantin al-MukhaUisI at Beirut in 1913; cf.Seybold's review in Z.D.M.G. uoc (1916), 565-8. The anecdote ,on themessage conveyed by a Qur'anic allusion is on p. 44 of the edition.

2 S. al-qasaj = xxvnx 19/20.3 This story also occurs, as Bjorkman notes, op. tit. p. 143, in Brunnow-

Fischer's Arabisebi CbrestomatbiP, pp. 4-5, where al-Mutanabbl is given asthe addressee of the letter. Qalqashandi probably took the anecdote fromNuwairl, Nibayat aU'arab (Cairo, 1343-7/192 3-7), m, 329; Fischer suggests,op. eit. p. 158, that it stems ultimately from the 'lad al-farid of Ibn 'AbdRabbihi (Bulaq, 1293/1876, m, 342). For other occasions when laconic,Qur'anic allusions are used to convey messages, see various anecdotes inthe First Discourse of Niziml 'ArudI Samarqandi's Cbabar maqala.

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