TheCodeBreakers
probably measured largely by its literacy, cryptography appears
spontaneously — as its parents, language and writing, probably also did.
The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two
or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to
cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. Cultural
diffusion seems a less likely explanation for its occurrence in. so many
areas, many of them distant and isolated.
The Yezidis, an obscure sect of about 25,000 people in, northern Iraq,
use a cryptic script in their holy books because they fear persecution by
their Moslem neighbors. Tibetans use a kind of cipher called "rin-spuns"
for official correspondence; it is named for its inventor Rin-c'(hhen-)
spuns(-pa), who lived in the 1300s. The Nsibidi secret society of Nigeria
keeps its pictographic script from Europeans as much as possible
because it is used chiefly to express love in rather direct imagery, and
annaabi.ee 
