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orion The DSS 'Cryptogram' Scrolls



Date: Mon, 01 Dec 1997 16:07:46 -0700
From: Mark Staker <MLStaker@chq.byu.edu>
Subject: The DSS 'Cryptogram' Scrolls
To: orion@mscc.huji.ac.il

I'm a new member of this list.  A couple of years ago an acquaintance of mine
attended a brown bag by Stephen Phann, who was working with Emmanuel Tov at
the DSS archive.  Phann was working at the time on what he (if memory serves)
called the "cryptogram" scrolls and said he had broken two of the three codes
in which the scrolls were written. 

The documents are all in standard Hebrew, but the characters used to write
the letters are not Hebrew or any other recognized script. There are only 22
characters used, which have a one to one correspondence with the Hebrew
alphabet, so the code was evidently fairly simple to break using letter
frequencies. 

At the time (this was about two years ago), Phann said he was about two years
away from publishing his work.  Does anyone on this list know if he has
"decoded" the scrolls and if his work is ready for publication? 

M. L. Staker