Ancient Writing Systems
This ancient Egyptian writing system used pictures and symbols to represent sounds, words, and ideas.
What is hieroglyphics?
Before writing existed, humans passed information through these methods. (3)
What are storytelling, songs, and oral traditions?
The science of creating and solving secret messages is called this.
What is cryptography?
Codebreakers look for repeated symbols and common words because they are searching for these.
What are patterns?
This Roman leader is associated with a famous letter-shifting cipher.
Who is Julius Caesar?
This early writing system from Mesopotamia was created by pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay tablets
What is cuneiform?
The Phoenicians helped influence many modern writing systems by developing this type of system where symbols represented sounds.
What is an alphabet?
Changing a readable message into a secret format is called this.
What is encryption?
This method of breaking codes studies how often letters appear in a language.
What is frequency analysis?
This cipher changes letters by moving them a certain number of spaces in the alphabet.
What is a Caesar Cipher?
Ancient Egyptian professional writers who recorded laws, taxes, stories, and religious texts were called these.
What are scribes?
Ancient Egyptians often wrote on this plant-based material that acted like paper.
What is papyrus?
Changing an encrypted message back into its original form is called this.
What is decryption?
In English, this letter is often one of the most common and can help codebreakers identify unknown symbols.
What is E?
This communication system uses dots and dashes and was used with telegraphs.
What is Morse Code?
This famous artifact helped historians decode Egyptian hieroglyphics because it contained the same message in three different scripts.
What is the Rosetta Stone?
This Chinese writing system is still used today and developed from older picture-like symbols.
What are Chinese characters?
In cryptography, this is the information that tells someone how to encrypt or decrypt a message.
What is a key?
A codebreaker sees the same three-symbol pattern appear five times. What strategy should they use first?
What is look for repeated words or phrases?
During World War II, these Native American speakers helped create secure military communications using their language.
Who are the Navajo Code Talkers?
Unlike an alphabet where symbols represent individual sounds, this type of writing system often uses symbols that represent entire ideas or words.
What is a logographic writing system?
This Mayan writing system combined symbols representing sounds, numbers, and ideas to record history, astronomy, and important events.
What are Mayan glyphs?
A cipher that replaces letters with other letters, numbers, or symbols is known as this type of cipher.
What is a substitution cipher?
A message contains the symbol pattern "XQX" many times. A codebreaker guesses it may represent a common word like "the." This process is an example of using what?
What is context and educated guessing?
Modern encryption protects information like passwords and banking data by using complex mathematical systems. This field combines cryptography with this modern technology.
What is computer science?