A few of the Dead Sea Scrolls feature mysterious scripts known as Cryptic A and B. These scripts use signs and symbols that were not part of any known writing system, making texts deliberately difficult to read. Cryptic A was deciphered in 1955. Surviving in only two manuscripts and a handful of fragments, Cryptic B has long resisted interpretation—until recently. Scholar Emmanuel Oliveiro of the University of Groningen applied a method inspired by the Cryptic A breakthrough: He treated Cryptic B as a monographic substitution cipher, where each Hebrew or Aramaic letter is replaced by a unique symbol. By comparing […]
