Polygraphia Nova

[2]: 121  The book was distributed as a private gift to selected European rulers, some of who also received an arca steganographica, a presentation chest containing wooden tallies used to encrypt and decrypt codes.

[3]: 271 [2]: 120 Kircher reported that the origin of the work was a request from Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III to develop "a kind of lingua universalis" which would allow written communication between all peoples.

[5] Systems of cryptography had been developed in Italy in late medieval times and by the 17th century many rulers employed cipher secretaries for diplomatic and other sensitive communication.

[2]: 113  The Thirty Years War gave rise to a range of scholarly publications summarising existing knowledge of the field, and there was a growing interest in the relationship between cryptography and linguistics.

[8] Kircher had an established interest in the origins and underlying unity of languages and writing systems, which he explored in various works including Prodromus Coptus (1636), Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (1643) and Turris Babel (1679).

[15] The first part indicated meaning: Kircher provided 1048 multilingual groups of words arranged over 32 pages in tables organised alphabetically in the order of the Latin column.

Kircher reminded the reader that the purpose of the work was to make possible the conversion of kings and princes around the world, and said that the method he described would allow a message to be written that could be understood in any language.

Thus Kircher claims, the phrase Cave ab eo quem non nosti ('beware him who you do not know) can easily be translated into ten languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Chinese.

The difficulty of using the arca without a full explanatory manual may have prompted Kircher to produce a single, standard edition of his various manuscripts, and he started sending our copies of Polygraphia Nova in June 1663.