The Naibbe cipher

[magnesium]

I have good news to report!

The Naibbe cipher seems to support the apparent right-to-left "reading" directionality I reported in this paper: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  (there is no doubt the manuscript was written left to right, I'm talking about reading right to left).

I run a few tests on the glyphs found in Naibbe's unigram encoding table, here are the first conclusions:

1. Left-descender 'l': Appears 4.8× more at word ENDINGS (19 vs 4)
   
   • In RTL reading, endings are on the visual left → RTL bias
     
2. Right-descender 'r': Appears 20× more at word ENDINGS (20 vs 1)
   
   • Also suggests RTL visual flow
     
3. Gallows 'q': Appears exclusively at word STARTS (35 vs 0)
   
   • In RTL reading, starts are on the visual right where gallows are drawn → Strong RTL bias
     

Thanks to Naibbe, we could have the beginning of an explanation: the original clear text (in Latin for instance) could be first written LTR on a wax tablet by the scribe, then encrypted with a Naibbe cipher mimicking the cleartext direction. Finally the cipher would be written LTR on velum, but reading each glyph to be copied... from right to left.

It could make sense to add this level of obfuscation for added confidentiality (in medieval times, not today...). 

Thoughts?


The table I used is: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Interesting work, thanks!