People had secrets to protect those seeds.

The first myth is to hide secrets were simple.

Over time they became more elaborate and used machines.

Today they were mathematical and would require an enormous amount of computing power to decipher.

Learn more about cryptography

and how communications are kept secret

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Cryptography is simply defined as, quote, the process or skill of communicating in or

deciphering secret writings or ciphers.

As we'll see, the definition has changed a little over time, and the modern definition has more to do with mathematics than it does with the more generic idea of ciphers.

That being said, as with pretty much everything I talk about in this podcast, the origins of

cryptography go back to ancient times.

If you go back far enough, there really was no need for cryptography.

Literacy was something that only a small number of people might have had in society, so they would have been the

cryptographers by default.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is a good example.

Unless you know the code, it's pretty much impossible to decipher exactly what the symbols mean.

This was why Egyptologists couldn't crack hieroglyphics until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which I talked about on a previous episode.

As literacy spread and systems of writing became simpler, there arose a need to hide messages.

The earliest known system of ciphers arose independently in many different places, including Mesopotamia, India, Greece, Rome, and Israel.

The system that all of these civilizations used were simple substitution ciphers.

A substitution ciphers when you just substitute one letter of the

alphabet for another. In its simplest form you just shift the letters over by a

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