Yesterday I was watching one of my favorite shows: La Dichosa Palabra (‘The Privileged Word’ in spanish). It’s a show where a bunch of literates talk about words, etimology, famous writters and, basically, they have fun with the things they know. In yesterday’s show they talked about the Copiale Codex. I got intrigued and googled it.

The Copiale Codex is a 105 page document supposedly made by a secret group of masons autodenominated the Highly Illuminated Oculist Society circa 1760. All it’s content is ciphered with latin and greek characters and some logograms. It was a mystery until 2011, when Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer broke the code with some translation algorithm used in Google Translate too (I haven’t found information about that last fact besides what the presenter said in the show). The transliterated, decoded german and plain english versions are available here, also you can download the original scanned document.

I loved the diacritics and the way the latin and greek characters look like together.