History PhD Student Reaches out to Cryptographers to Help Break a Civil War Code

Since he was using very uncommon symbols and the cipher is old, it's not so unlikely, that the author used a simple letter replacement table. Something like:<p>a -&#62; #,<p>b -&#62; *,<p>c -&#62; =,<p>...<p>and so on. Unfortunately the handwriting is a bit messy and hard to read, but I'd try to make a frequency table for every symbol and compare that to a frequency table of letters in the english language:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency</a><p>Now try to replace the most frequent symbol with e, the second most frequent symbol with a or t and so on. Try some variations and look, if it makes any sense.

It will take a major feat of cryptanalysis just to decipher the guy's handwriting, let alone the code parts.<p>Thanks for reminding me why I work with computers.

Here's the first four images... ready for parsing by your program:<p>:::: image 1, left:<p>s-tac-toe equals minus-dot seven ex comma slash-slash-backslash gamma capital-l lower-j ex slash<p>:::: image 1, right, downward<p>capital-t capital-i equals four parallel-lines slash-slash-backslash equals-slash comma s-tac-toe slash-slash-backslash slash-slash-backslash-backslash comma<p>:::: image 1, left, upper<p>capital-l divided-by capital-i comma equivalent comma lower-j comma capital-f slash-slash-backslash capital-i squared-capital-n zee slash-slash-backslash-backslash comma divided-by slash-slash comma slash-backslash-backslash slash-slash minus-dot slash-slash-backslash<p>:::: image 2<p>plus-dot plus leaning-heart upsidedown-t minus vertical-line ex comma<p>leaning-heart capital-m capital-i capital-a minus three-peaks comma vertical-line crap capital-b close-bracket plus script-j script-s lower-d comma<p>u-bar three-peaks capital-i<p>:::: image 3<p>capital-l backslash divided-by c-slash-slash capital-i comma capital-i equivalent divided-by slash-slash-backslash-backslash comma capital-i minus-dot three-horizontal-two-vertical ex comma equals zee capital-l<p>l-in-l 11-over-1 comma y-slash-slash slash-slash-backslash-backslash comma capital-i divided-by comma minus-lower-dot c-omega slash-slash slash-i 11-over-1 slash-slash square-c equals capital-l equivalent slash-slash comma<p>capital-l slash-slash slash comma l-on-l plus slash-backslash-backslash slash-slash-backslash-backslash comma 1-slash-1 11-over-1 capital-z comma capital-i equals ex comma j divided-by c-slash-slash slash-slash capital-l divided-by slash-slash ex comma<p>:::: image 4 (repeats image 2)<p>plus-dot plus leaning-heart upsidedown-t minus vertical-line ex comma<p>leaning-heart capital-m capital-i capital-a minus three-peaks comma vertical-line crap capital-b close-bracket plus script-j script-s lower-d comma<p>u-bar three-peaks capital-i

I've somehow been conditioned to think of these Civil War diaries and letters as full of flowery prose and beautiful handwriting. It's actually amazing to me to see someone writing plainly and with handwriting almost as bad as my own.

Forwarded to a cryptography Professor and some of his students : )

Is this what is needed?:<p>1. Assign ascii to the symbols in the code<p>2. Transcribe the code to ascii<p>3. Solve the code in ascii using techniques from Snyder and Barzilay

perhaps its a form of shorthand<p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Eclectic_shorthand_by_cross.png/200px-Eclectic_shorthand_by_cross.png" rel="nofollow">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Ecl...</a>

It's astonishing to me how little understanding people have of Unicode.