TheCodeBreakers
ing. Perhaps most interesting to cryptologists, amateur or
professional, is that Vatsyayana's famous textbook of erotics, the Kama-
sutra, lists secret writing as one of the 64 arts, or yogas, that women
should know and practice. The fourth great civilization of antiquity, the
Mesopo-tamian, rather paralleled Egypt early in its cryptographic
evolution, but then surpassed it. Thus, in the last period of cuneiform
writing, in colophons written at Uruk (in present-day Iraq) under the
Seleucid kings in the last few score years before the Christian era,
occasional scribes converted their names into numbers. The
encipherment—if such it be—may have been only for amusement or to
show off.
The Holy Scriptures themselves have not escaped a touch of
cryptography—or protocryptography, to be precise, for the element of
secrecy is lacking.
Hebrew tradition offers at least two such conversions in the Old
Testament (none are recorded for the New). In Jeremiah 25:26 and 51:41,
annaabi.ee 
