Go to the rare scripts database

Echoes of History: Analysis and Decipherment of Historical Writings

This project pioneers new methods to analyze historical texts written in rare, non-standard, or undeciphered writing systems. Using cutting-edge techniques from computational linguistics and AI, we aim to develop tools that can automatically identify, transcribe, and interpret these sources.

Our goals include building a digital corpus, creating recognition models for scripts and layouts, and developing frameworks for linguistic analysis and decipherment. This interdisciplinary initiative brings together experts from computer science, computer vision, cryptology, natural language processing, archeology, history and linguistics to advance our understanding of forgotten languages and cultures.

Resources

Ciphers

View all ciphers in the
DECODE database

Unknown Writings

Coming soon:
unknown writings in the
DECODE database

Historical Texts

View all historical corpora in the
HistCorp database

Open Source

View open source code on GitHub

Open Research

View open research results
and output on Zenodo

Tools

CTTS

A desktop tool for manual transcription

TranscriptTool

A web-based tool for
semi-automatic transcription
using AI

CrypTool 2 (CT2)

A desktop tool for breaking historical and modern ciphers

CrypTool-Online

An online tool for breaking (simpler) historical ciphers

Principal Investigator

Prof. Beata Megyesi
Project Leader
Stockholm University
Sweden

Core Team

Alicia Fornés
Computer Vision
Center, UAB,
Spain

Mihály Héder
Computer Research
Institute, HUN-REN
SZTAKI, Hungary

Raphaela Heil
Stockholm
University,
Sweden

Lei Kang
Computer Vision Center,
UAB
Spain

Nils Kopal
Hochschule
Niederrhein
Germany

Benedek Láng
ELTE
University
Hungary

Eva Pettersson
Uppsala
University
Sweden

Rune Rattenborg
Lund
University
Sweden

Michelle Waldispühl
University of
Oslo
Norway

Participants

Doris Behrendt
Universität der Bundeswehr
München, Germany

Micaella Bruton
Stockholm University
Sweden

Jialuo Chen
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Spain

Bernhard Esslinger
University of Siegen
Germany

Richárd Fülöp
ELTE
Hungary

Giuseppe de Gregorio
,Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Spain

Kathryn Kelley
Stockholm and Uppsala University
Sweden

George Lasry
CrypTool Project
Israel/Germany

Boglárka Párdi
ELTE University
Hungary

Wout Sinnaeve
University of Oslo
Norway

Crina Tudor
Stockholm University
Sweden

Oreen Yousuf
Uppsala University
Sweden

Further Contributors

Adelaida López, SpainMarino Oliveros-Blanco, SpainCosimo Palma, ItalyAlejandra Reinares, Spain
Diego Valladares, Sweden

Would you like to contribute? Get in touch to discuss opportunities for collaboration!

DESCRYPT in the News

Outreach

2026

  • Bruton, M. (2026) The Decipherment of Ciphers with Neural Models. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Fornés, A. & Heil, R. (2026) The Transcription of Writing Systems: Computational Challenges. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Kelley, K. (2026) Language vs. Writing: How do Diverse Visual Communication Strategies Shape Decipherment Methodologies? Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Kopal, N. (2026) The Automatic Decipherment of Rare Writings: The DescryptTool. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Láng, B. (2026) Ami a da Vinci-kódból kimaradt: megfejtett és megfejtetlen titkosírások ( What was left out of The Da Vinci Code: deciphered and undeciphered secret codes) Talk in the Krúdy Gyula English-Hungarian Bilingual primary school, Budapest. 22. January, 2026.
  • Láng, B. (2026) Shorthands and Artificial Languages and Writings. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) AI for the Humanities & the Humanities for AI: Solving Hidden Codes and Undeciphered Languages. Invited talk to kick-off the new seminar series of HumAI. Gothenburg University, Sweden. January 15, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Att avkoda det förflutna: AI och analysen av historiens dolda texter. Stockholms Humanistiska Förbund. February 5, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Hidden Codes and Undeciphered Languages. Invited talk. HumLab. Umeå University, Sweden. February 24, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Analysis and Decipherment of Historical Writings: New Approaches to Analyzing Rare and Unknown Scripts Invited talk. Human Science Meeting on Research on AI, Stockholm University, Sweden. March 6, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Invited talk about the topic: What does linguistics gain from interdisciplinarity, and what does interdisciplinarity gain from linguistics? Kungliga Vetenskapssamhället. Uppsala, Sweden. April 16, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Welcome and Introduction to the DESCRYPT Program. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Megyesi, B. (2026) Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered Scripts. Oral presentation at the workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA), Language Resources and Evaluation. Palma, Mallorca, Spain. May 11, 2026. 
  • Rattenborg, R. & Waldispühl, M. (2026) Rare Scripts of the World. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026.
  • Sinneave, W. (2026) Digitisation and Restoration of Runic Inscriptions Using HTR and Transformer Models. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026. 
  • Sinnaeve, W. (2026) HTR for runic inscriptions. Workshop on Graphic variation and HTR. University of Oslo. June 19, 2026.
  • Waldispühl, M. (2026) Graphic variation in historical writing: A short introduction. Workshop on Graphic variation and HTR. University of Oslo. June 19, 2026.
  • Yousuf, W. (2026) Ajami Manuscripts. Workshop on Philology Meets AI: Deciphering Rare Scripts. Stockholm University. May 4-5, 2026. 

2025

  • Fornés, A. (2025) The archival and research technologies of the future. Round Table: “The Archives of the Future”. XXVIII Curs Comtat d’Urgell. “Memòria, Escriptura i Poder”. Balaguer (Spain), 7 May 2025.
  • Fornés, A. (2025) Artificial Intelligence for Archival Data. Panel “Archives of AI and Accessibility. International Archives Congress (ICA). Barcelona, Spain. October 30, 2025.
  • Fornés, A. (2025) Reconocimiento de documentos históricos escritos a mano (Recognition of Historical Handwritten Documents) Webinar ACHIRP (Asociación Chilena de Reconocimiento de Patrones. Online. November 26, 2025.
  • Fornés, A. (2025) Automatic Reading and Transcription of Documents. Round Table at the Workshop La Documentació Medieval. Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Barcelona, Spain. December 2, 2025.
  • Fornés, A. (2025) Handwriting Recognition in Low Resource Scenarios. Seminar. Luleå University of Technology. Luleå, Sweden. December 8, 2025.
  • Heil, R., Kang, L., Fornés, A. & Megyesi, B. (2025) Hand-Written Text Recognition for Historical Writings with Rare and Unknown Scripts: The DESCRYPT Project. Poster presentation on March 13, 2025 at the Swedish Symposium on Image Analysis (SSBA) and Swedish Symposium on Deep Learning (SSDL), KTH, Stockholm.
  • Kopal, N (2025) Geheime Botschaften knacken (Breaking Secret Messages). Museum Schloss Rhydt, Mönchen-Gladbach, Germany. October 30, 2025. [https://schlossrheydt.de/wp-content/uploads//sites/2/2025/07/MSR_25_02_MUS_FLY_RZ_WEB.pdf]
  • Láng, B. (2025) Kódok, titkok, félreértések: A kriptográfia mindennapi története a 16–17. században (Codes, secrets, misunderstandings: The everyday history of cryptography in the 16th and 17th centuries), public plennary talk given in Hungarian on the yearly conference of the Eötvös Collegium in Budapest.
  • Láng, B. (2025) Beyond Encryption: The Social History of Secrecy and Cryptography in EarlyModern Europe. Talk at the conference: The Edges of Truth: Secrecy, Artifice, and the Limits ofKnowledge, September 17-18, 2025. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025) Unlocking Hidden Histories: AI and Expert Collaboration in Deciphering Rare Scripts. Keynote talk. Resources and representations for under-resourced languages and domains, RESOURCEFUL-2025, Workshop at the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), Tallinn, Estonia. March 2, 2025.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025) Historical Cryptology Building infrastructure for historical encrypted sources. Invited talk. University of Zürich, Switzerland. April 8, 2025.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025) Dolda koder, okända språk – digital humaniora söker svar. (Hidden Codes and Unknown Languages – Digital Humanities in Search of Answers.) Invited talk, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism. September 24, 2025.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025) AI som verktyg för analys av språklig data: Metodutveckling i humaniora. (AI as a Tool for the Analysis of Linguistic Data – Method Development in the Humanities.) Workshop on e-Infrastructure for the vice chancellors of Swedish universities organized by The Swedish Research Council and SUHF.  November 5, 2025.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025) Echoes of History: Analysis and Decipherment of Historical Writings. New Approached to Analyzing Rare and Unknown Scripts. November 21, 2025. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.
  • Megyesi, B. (2025)  De olästa rösterna – Hur AI hjälper oss att tyda historiens hemliga språk. (The Undecipered Voices – How AI Helps Us Decipher the Secret Languages of History). The Language Museum, Kulturhuset, Stockholm. December 15, 2025
  • Rattenborg, R. (2025) Pick to Pixel: An Introduction to Cuneiform in the Digital Age. Invited talk. National Graduate School of Digital Philology (DigPhil). November 13, 2025
  • Rattenborg, R., and Megyesi, B. (2025) Echoes of History (DESCRYPT): Analysis and Decipherment of Ancient and Rare Writing Systems. Poster presented at Inscribed Pasts – European Association of Archaeologists 31st Annual Meeting, Belgrade 2-6 September 2025
  • Waldispühl, M. (2025) Analysis and Decipherment of Historical Writings: The DESCRYPT Project. Presentation at the BærUt! Network and Skills Hub for Sustainable Digital Scholarly Editions, 14 August 2025, University of Oslo, Norway.
  • Waldispühl, M. (2025) What historical cryptographic writing reveals about the evolution of orthographic systems. Invited talk at the conference Graphemes, syllables and morphemes: Comparative perspectives on historical spelling, 20 June 2025, Bad Nauheim/Universität Gießen.

Publications

2026

  • Bruton, M., Beloucif, M., and Megyesi, B. (2026) Bridging the Low Resource Gap in Historical Cryptology: A Multilingual Diachronic Synthetic Dataset for Reproducible Cryptanalysis. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL). LREC 2026. pp. 13-24. Mallorca, Spain. [http://lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2026/workshops/resourceful/2026.resourceful-1.0.pdf]
  • Heil, R., Fornés, A., Láng, B., and Megyesi, B. (2026) Establishing a Document Layout Analysis Baseline for Historical Cipher Keys. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptology (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Kang, L., De Gregorio, G., Heil, R., Fornés, A., and Megyesi, B. (2026) Learning to Decipher from Pixels — A Case Study of Copiale. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptology (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Kopal N., Kray M., and Esslinger B. (2026) CrypLLM: A Built-in Chat Assistant for CrypTool 2. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptologi (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Láng, B. (2026) Combinatorial Wheels and Movable Alphabets: from Ramon Llull to Leon Battista Alberti. Submitted to HistoCrypt 2026. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptologi (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Megyesi, B., Rattenborg, R., Láng, B., Waldispühl, M. & Héder, M. (2026). Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered Scripts. In Proceedings of Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA), Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 184-196. Spain. [http://lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2026/workshops/lt4hala/2026.lt4hala-1.0.]
  • Oliveros-Blanco, M. O., Fornés, A., Kang, L., and Megyesi, B. (2026) Joint Transcription and Decryption of Images of Ciphered Handwritten Documents: A Comparison with the Traditional Pipeline. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptology (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Rattenborg, R. et al. (2026) The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI): A free database of all cuneiform texts. Isin Journal for Archaeology, History and Ancient Languages. (in press)
  • Reinares, A., Fornés, A., de Gregorio, G., and Megyesi, B. (2026) Exploring the Automatic Alphabet Identification of Images of Handwritten Ciphers. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Historical Cryptology (HistoCrypt 2026), France. (In Press)
  • Waldispühl, M. and Megyesi, B. (2026). Language choice in eighteenth-century diplomatic ciphers from Europe. In G. Kazakov & V. Rjéoutski (eds.). Languages of Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 202–225.
  • Waldispühl, M., Megyesi, B., Kopal, N., and Fornés, A. (in press). Grapholinguistic features of historical ciphers and challenges for computer-based transcription and cryptanalysis. In: Kazzazi, K., Schulte, M. & Waxenberger, G. (eds.). From the Maya Script to the Germanic Runes – Case Studies on the Typology of Scripts and Research on Writing Systems. Wiesbaden: Reichert. 
  • Waldispühl, M. (2026). Writing runes – how and why? Sociolinguistic approaches to South Germanic runic inscriptions. In: Rosselli Del Turco, R. (ed.). Atti del Seminario avanzato 2023 – Le rune II. Torino. (in press)
  • Yousuf, O., Djibril Diagne, E., Høgel, Ch., Megyesi, B., and Nivre, J. (2026) A Dataset of Wolof Ajami Manuscripts for HTR and OCR. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2026). May 11-16, 2026, Mallorca, Spain. (In Press)

2025

Thesis

  • Aanje, S. (2025). Geheimschriften in deutschen Postkarten. Entzifferung mit CrypTool 2 und schriftlinguistische Analyse historischer Postkarten aus dem späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Bachelor thesis, University of Oslo., Norway