Solution of Le Tellier-Castelnau Cipher (1657)

A letter from Le Tellier to Castelnau, dated 12 May 1657 includes an undeciphered ciphertext (see another article). The following introduces its solution (including discussion of what remains to be identified and historical context) available at github (contributor: Robert Pitt).

As with other ciphers of Le Tellier, this cipher provides for syllables. The assignment of syllables are almost regular, though "ca" to "ju" (bare numbers) and "la" to "tu" (numbers with an overbar) form separate groups. The first half of this regular assignment appears to be the same as Le Tellier-Colbert Cipher 1 (DE=47), but the latter half (as well as the substitution cipher and the nomenclature) is not the same.

(In the above image, I adopted two corrections in my transcription from Pitt's description.)

I suppose this ciphertext was too short for a conventional solver for general syllable assignment. I believe the regularity of the assignment was given as a constraint or training data. I hope the codebreaking method will be published some time.



©2026 S.Tomokiyo
First posted on 17 September 2026. Last modified on 17 September 2026. Encoded in UTF-8.
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