The pragmatic nature of the script

[-JKP-]

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Here's a medieval code from a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (you can easily see the difference between the enciphered portion and the plain text)


They are like this because they weren't designed to encode an entire book, only phrases or even words. The idea of encoding a whole book didn't appear until literacy was high enough to warrant this; indeed, in the middle ages the word "cipher" didn't even exist. The idea was always to hide the most important, key point. In all the medieval cipher manuscripts I know of, only key words or phrases are encoded.
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The numbering system shown in this Swedish text is very common in Nordic texts and is basically runic in concept.

It's based on a logical system of trunks and branches, with the trunk "anchoring" the branches, so that the successive position of the branches denotes increasing quantities. Variations of this system exist all over Scandinavia, parts of England, and Normandy. Most of the ones I've seen have vertical trunks (like trees), but those with horizontal trunks are essentially the same idea. They were often used by tradesmen to mark bales, barrels, and other containers that have to hold certain quantities of goods and lasted as an alternate numbering system (to Roman and Arabic numericals) into fairly recent times. I think millers and possibly fishermen used it.

Here you see the same nine "digits" mirrored and flipped. Sometimes the mirroring and flipping denoted larger numbers (beyond 9) and sometimes it was simply to show how the basic set looked in different orientations. In many of these systems, the higher numbers tended to be more complex because they incorporated more branches, while in some, the tens digits simply used a different shape.


In some of these systems, the parts were elegantly combined (rather than each character drawn individually) to make composite numbers and it appears that the original design was conceived so that this could be done. This allowed large numbers to be written in less space (in a sense similar to the way Korean characters are combined except that the parts of the numbers actually touch each other to create new shapes).

Most of them were not codes in the sense of hiding information, they were continuance of much older numbering systems based on those that existed before Roman and Arabic influences reached the north. They could, of course, be co-opted as cipher characters if someone wanted to, and would look inscrutable to someone not familiar with the system (especially the combined characters), but that was not their original intention.