Where this idea comes from
Letters unread for 440 years
Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote letters in a secret code from 1578 to 1584, mostly to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador in England. More than fifty of them sat in the national library of France, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and nobody knew what they were.
One thing to hold: A page of strange symbols, about 440 years old.
Why it matters: In February 2023 three code-breakers, George Lasry, Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo, published how they read them, in a journal about codes called Cryptologia. A message nobody could read for more than 400 years was read again.
What we don’t know: How the letters reached the library, and why they went unread for so long, is not known.
Dates:
- 1578 The first of the coded letters is written.
- 1584 The last of them is written.
- 2023 Lasry, Biermann and Tomokiyo publish how they read them.