By Clayton
The first people to use the Scytale were the Greeks in 500 B.C. They used it during battles. Battle commanders were sent Scytale messages from the rulers. Now that's an old cipher!
1. Find a cylinder shaped object (such as a tube from paper towels).
2. Cut
paper into
long strips 1/2 inch wide and tape the strips together into one long strip.
3.
Wrap
the strip of paper around the cylinder until it covers the tube from one
end to the other. Try to avoid overlapping and gaps.
4. Write your message along the length of the tube by placing one letter per strip of the paper. As you need more space, rotate the tube away from you and keep writing.
5. Now unravel the strip and send the message to a friend.
1. Make sure
the friend has the exact same sized cylinder as the person who wrote the message.
2. Rewrap the strip of paper around the same sized cylinder and read the message.
Other Tips
The size of the cylinder isn't important as long as the person writing the message and the person reading the message have the exact same sized tubes. You can use cylinder shapes such as toilet paper tubes, cans, or even pencils. The ancient Greeks used wooden sticks and parchment paper.
One way to really keep your Scytale message top secret is to write the message in invisible ink or write it using a substitution cipher.
Citations
Books
Hill,
Labin Carrick. Spy’s
Survival
Handbook. New York: Scholastic and
Tangerine Press, 2003.
Sarnoff, Jane and Reynold Ruffins. The Code and Cipher Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
|Code and Cipher Basics| |Spies| |Bugs, Taps and Surveillance| |The Enigma Machine| |Invisible Ink| |Morse Code Cipher| |Picture Cipher| |Transposition Ciphers| |Pig Pen Cipher| |Hand Signal Code| |American Sign Language Code| |Jefferson's Wheel Cipher| |Substitute Cipher| |Alberti Cipher Wheels| |The Scytale Cipher| |Grid Cipher|