History of the Greek alphabet Plutarch criticizes Herodotus for prejudice and misrepresentation. Furthermore, he argues that "Gephyraei" were Euboeans or Eretrians and he doubts the reliability of Herodotus' sources. Plutarch and other ancient Greek writers credited the legendary Palamedes of Nauplion on Euboea with the invention of the supplementary letters not found in the original Phoenician alphabet. The distinction between "Eta" and "Epsilon" and between "Omega" and "Omicron", adopted in the Ionian standard, was traditionally attributed to Simonides of Ceos (556-469). Plutarch goes further back to describe an older Greek writing system, similar as he attested to the Egyptian writing. In his “Discourse Concerning Socrates’s
The Alphabet Cipher The Alphabet Cipher Lewis Carroll published "The Alphabet-Cipher" in 1868, possibly in a children's magazine. It describes what is known as a Vigenère cipher, a well-known scheme in cryptography. While Carroll calls this cipher "unbreakable", Kasiski had published a volume describing how to break such ciphers from five years earlier, and Charles Babbage had secretly found ways to break polyalphabetic ciphers during the Crimean War. The piece begins with a tabula recta. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Each column of this table forms a dictionary of symbols representing the alphabet: thus, in the A column, the symbol is the same as the letter represented;