it seems that there were plain language versions of some correspondence from Mary to her French contact using those ciphers. However the total number of glyphs is said to be nearly 150,000 ? the article says nothing about combinatorial elements of those glyphs.. it must be that they combine, to get such a big set. also interesting to see that many or most common glyphs like greek were recoded
From figure 3 in the paper linked elsewhere in the thread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34718588>, it looks like 219 distinct symbols, most with diacritics, like a plus with a dot below it, or a 4 with a dot to the right.
Edit: much further down it is also mentioned "Eventually, we were able to recover the meaning of almost all the 219 distinct symbol types". Wasn't sure if I had counted correctly!
It's basically a substitution cipher, with some elements mapping to the same symbol to defeat frequency analysis and a few special ones like symbols for individual place, month, or person names, or a symbol to delete or duplicate the previous character.
Edit2: figure 13 gives a good overview. There's no combinatorics involved like with modern ciphers.
Letters she sent were decoded at the time. The evidence leading to her being executed was largely based on that. It is a simple substitution cipher so vulnerable to letter frequency analysis. So the article title is either misunderstanding or click-bait. They do appear to have found previously lost letters which is very interesting. But deciphering them is easy.
Am I dense, or is this article and https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/lost-and-found-code-... (mentioned by another commenter) almost completely void of details about the cipher? I'm most interested in how Mary was encrypting these letters, but apart from an image or two in the article mentioned above, and this quote "The documents contained only graphical symbols (more than 150,000 in total)", there's nothing.
The cipher is relatively trivial. The remarkable part is that these are previously unknown letters, primary sources from an important historical event.
It could have been broken long ago if anyone had thought it was interesting. So it's less like deciphering the Voynich Manuscript and more like finding a cache of letters at a yard sale.
I had the same reaction The Guardian article just says:
"The letters reveal Mary’s distrust of Walsingham and Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was a favourite of Elizabeth’s. In the letters, many of which were sent to the French ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissiere, Mary complained about her poor health, the conditions of her captivity, and spoke about her efforts to negotiate with Elizabeth for her release. The letters document her attempts to win over some of Elizabeth’s officials with presents. Mary also expresses her distress about her son, referred to as “mon fils” or my son, later King James VI of Scotland and James I of England, who was taken away from her at the age of one."
The ars article shows an image of an original encryption table used in some other letters by MQS. It's a quite detailed manual. The researchers apparently did consult that and other known tables in their analysis.
Also mentioned,
"... The authors noted that seven of the eight newly decoded letters turned out to have plaintext copies preserved in British archives, adding, "It would seem that the leak from the embassy was quite effective and comprehensive" ..."
, as there were some spies at the time in the French embassy that were leaking the decoded texts.
Btw, there's doi link at the end of the ars article.
> Dr John Guy ... said the findings are a “literary and historical sensation” and mark the most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots for more than 100 years.
This is why commas are important; I’m pretty sure Mary was not Queen of Scots for that long.
The famous humorous example is "I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Sometimes an example can be humorous, educational, and technically not actually confusing.
My favourite in this genre comes from Sky News: "Top stories: World leaders at Mandela tribute, Obama-Castro handshake and same-sex marriage date set".
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/lost-and-found-code-...