Speaker 1: Going back to ancient times, we go as we're going
Speaker 1: to learn about the skittily scy Tha l e before
Speaker 1: we get started, making sure to share and subscribe. Today
Speaker 1: we're looking at before algorithms, before the binary code, before
Speaker 1: anything we recognize.
Speaker 2: As a computer.
Speaker 1: The Spartan's built a military encryption system so elegant that
Speaker 1: survives centuries of warfare. Today we're going to explore the
Speaker 1: Siteles or Skittily, a wooden baton that turned a strip
Speaker 1: of leather into the ancient world's most guardly secret, most
Speaker 1: closely guarded secret. We go inside the Peloponnesian War to
Speaker 1: understand what it meant to trust a piece of wood
Speaker 1: with your army's survival. So I imagine you're a Spartan general.
Speaker 1: You're deep in enemy territory. Athenian scouts have been spotted
Speaker 1: on the ridge line, your supply lines are thinning, and
Speaker 1: your next move depends entirely on a message you've just
Speaker 1: received from Sparta. They run oer hands you a narrow
Speaker 1: strip of leather.
Speaker 2: You look at it.
Speaker 1: It's gibberish, just letters, random, meaningless, scattered across the hide,
Speaker 1: like someone drop the alphabet and never bothered to clean
Speaker 1: it up.
Speaker 2: You pull a wooden baton from.
Speaker 1: Your belt, You wrap the leather strap around it in
Speaker 1: a tight spiral, and then word by word, line by line,
Speaker 1: a sentence emerges between the gaps. Return im mediately Athens
Speaker 1: moves north. You've just witnessed the world's first documented transposition
Speaker 1: cipher and the device in your hand that's the skidily.
Speaker 1: And for a few critical centuries in ancient Greece, it
Speaker 1: was the difference between military victory and catastrophic, blood soaked failure.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the fifth century BC.
Speaker 2: Here. Greece is not a unified nation.
Speaker 1: It's a patchwork of city states, each with its own culture,
Speaker 1: military and political identity. Two of the most powerful are
Speaker 1: Athens in Sparta, and they've been locked in a cold
Speaker 1: war that's about to go.
Speaker 2: Very very hot.
Speaker 1: The Peloponnesian War runs from four thirty one to four
Speaker 1: h four BC, and it is the fining conflict of
Speaker 1: the ancient Greek world. Athens has the navy, Sparta has
Speaker 1: the army. Athens has philosophers and playwrights. Sparta has the
Speaker 1: most discipline's psychologically hardened soldiers in recorded history, men who
Speaker 1: are taken from their families at age seven and forged
Speaker 1: into something closer to.
Speaker 2: Weapons than humans.
Speaker 1: And Sparta also has something else, something quieter, something that
Speaker 1: almost nobody talks about when they talk about ancient warfare.
Speaker 1: They have operational security. Here's how the skiddy worked. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell you. I want you to really
Speaker 1: sit with the elegance of this, because it's stunning in
Speaker 1: its simplicity. The Spartan Military Commission a set of wooden
Speaker 1: batons cylindrical staffs, all cut to a very specific standardized diameter.
Speaker 1: One stays in Sparta, in the hands of the yepfors
Speaker 1: the governing Council. Another travels with the commanding General in
Speaker 1: the field, same diameter, same device. When Sparta needs to
Speaker 1: send a message, ascribe takes a long, thin strip of
Speaker 1: leather or parchment and winds it tightly around the baton
Speaker 1: in a diagonal spiral, edge to edge. Then they write
Speaker 1: the message lengthwise across the surface of the wrap leather,
Speaker 1: one letter per section, tracking down the baton like a
Speaker 1: column of text. Then they unwrapped the strip. What you're
Speaker 1: left with looks like pure noise, letters scattered across a
Speaker 1: long ribbon with no apparent logic. No word breaks, no
Speaker 1: identifiable sequence to anyone who intercepts it.
Speaker 2: It's meaningless.
Speaker 1: You could read it forwards, backwards, and columns and rows
Speaker 1: and get nothing. But the moment you wrap that strip
Speaker 1: around a baton of the same exact diameter, the spiral realigns,
Speaker 1: the columns of letters stack, the message surfaces like a
Speaker 1: photograph developing in a dark room. This is transposition cryptography,
Speaker 1: not substitution, where you wrap one letter for another, but transposition,
Speaker 1: where you physically.
Speaker 2: Scramble the order of the letters.
Speaker 1: The information is all there, it's just geometrically hidden, and
Speaker 1: in four hundred BC, that was enough to change the
Speaker 1: outcome of wars. Here's where it gets interesting, and this
Speaker 1: is the part that doesn't usually show up in the
Speaker 1: history textbooks. Imagine you're a spartan field commander. You received
Speaker 1: a message. You're runner made it through barely. You know
Speaker 1: Athens has agents on the roads. You know there are
Speaker 1: mercenaries who sell information whoever pays.
Speaker 2: You know that the.
Speaker 1: Leather strip your runner carried pass through dozens of miles
Speaker 1: of hostile territory. And here's a question that would have
Speaker 1: kept any rational commander awake at night. What if someone
Speaker 1: found a baton close enough in diameter to read it.
Speaker 1: This isn't paranoia, this is threat modeling. The sctile's entire
Speaker 1: security rested on one physical variable, the diameter of the staff.
Speaker 1: If an adversary could capture enough ENCRYPTID messages, could they
Speaker 1: reverse engineer the baton size through trial and error? Could
Speaker 1: they whittle a series of staffs of slightly varying wits
Speaker 1: until one made the message court Here we don't have
Speaker 1: clear historical evidence that the Athenians ever cracked Scaily this way,
Speaker 1: but the possibility was structurally real, and any commander who
Speaker 1: understood the system knew it. This is one of the
Speaker 1: earliest documented examples of what intelligence professionals today called cryptographics anxiety,
Speaker 1: the specific psychological burden of not knowing whether your communications
Speaker 1: have been compromised.
Speaker 2: You operate on the assumption.
Speaker 1: Of security, but you could never be certain, and in warfare,
Speaker 1: that uncertainty is its own kind of wound. Plutarch, writing
Speaker 1: centuries later, gives us some of our best documentation on
Speaker 1: the scittiy. He references it in his account of the
Speaker 1: Spartan general Lysander receiving a critical message, a warning about
Speaker 1: a conspiracy involving the Persian satrap far anabasis, wrapped in
Speaker 1: a belt delivered by a messenger. The message, once decode,
Speaker 1: it likely shaped one of the pivotal political maneuvers of
Speaker 1: the late Pilidiphnesian War. That's not a footnote, that's cryptography
Speaker 1: altering the arc of ancient geopololitics. What's remarkable is that
Speaker 1: the skittley wasn't just a clever trick.
Speaker 2: It was institutionalized.
Speaker 1: It was baked into Spartan military protocol at the state level.
Speaker 1: The eepers held one baton, the general held another.
Speaker 2: This was infrastructure, this was policy. This is what we
Speaker 2: now call a.
Speaker 1: Cryptographic key management system. Standardized, distributed, operationally integrated. SPARTA was,
Speaker 1: in a very real sense, the world's first crypto state.
Speaker 1: Time you send an encrypted message, every time your phone
Speaker 1: scrambles a text into your ciphertext before it leaves your hand,
Speaker 1: you're participating in a tradition that began on a hillside
Speaker 1: and Laconia with a wooden baton and a strip of leather.
Speaker 1: The tools have changed, yes, quantum computing is already threatening
Speaker 1: the encryption standards we rely on today, But the core problem,
Speaker 1: how do you send a secret across hostile territory without
Speaker 1: it being read. Is exactly what a Spartan scribe was solving.
Speaker 1: Twenty five hundred years ago, the skiddily did an ingest
Speaker 1: encrypt messages to encrypted trust had said, only someone who
Speaker 1: already has what you have can understand what you're telling them.
Speaker 1: In warfare and diplomacy and intelligence, that's still the whole
Speaker 1: game