TheCodeBreakers
bordering the thin ribbon of the Nile, a master scribe sketched out the
hieroglyphs that told the story of his lord's life—and in so doing he
opened the recorded history of cryptology. His was not a system of secret
writing as the modern
world knows it; he used no fully developed code of hieroglyphic
symbol substitutions. His inscription, carved about 1900 B.C. into the
living rock in the main chamber of the tomb of the nobleman
Khnumhotep II, merely uses some unusual hieroglyphic symbols here
and there in place of the more ordinary ones. Most occur in the last 20
columns of the inscription's 222, in a section recording the monuments
that Khnumhotep had erected in the service of the pharaoh Amenemhet
II. The intention was not to make it hard to read the text. It was to
impart a dignity and authority to it, perhaps in the same way that a
government proclamation will spell out "In the year of Our Lord One
annaabi.ee 
