Modern historians tend to agree that the first cities and foundations of sedentary life style can be traced back to Mesopotamia and China around 4500 B.C.E. As these societies grew with more people, more food, and a larger need for more administration and communication over these topics, the beginnings of modern cities and nation-states arose, but conflict arose and new enemies were formed as competition for resources, religion, and rights abounded, a need to discretely yet effectively communicate ideas ranging from military movements and needs, to conveying national secrets to other peoples, to protecting a person’s life works from thieves arose. Hence cryptography was born.
Cryptography only became needed when humans emerged from a hunter-gatherer life style into a more modern, civilized, and connected one. Thus as Singh points out in his book, The Code Book “Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics” (15). What Singh is really saying here is that cryptography could not have come about until civilization became complex enough that humans could be taken from food production and diversify their skills into other areas like those mentioned by Singh. Therefore, it is not to say that advanced mathematical, statistical, and linguistic skills are NOT required for cryptography; rather, it is to say that what must have been ‘advanced’ for those early humans is trivial content for most 21st century humans.
In short, humans began settling in organized cities in Mesopotamia and China around 4500 B.C.E. These cities were the precursors to 21st century human civilization. As humans developed more knowledge and enemies, they used their knowledge to devise secret methods of communication to send and receive confidential information. This led to cryptography, the study of breaking and making codes. It also explains why a group of undergraduate students at GVSU were able to easily break some basic ciphers without any formal training in cryptography; that is, what was advanced in 4500 B.C.E in mathematics, statistics, and linguistics is, fairly, basic knowledge in 21st century America. A rough, very rough, analagy can be drawn between the creation of modern day weapons of war and the birth of cryptography in the sense that cryptography arose due to the need to send and receive sensitive information in the presence of an enemy, and modern warfare has developed ever more destructive weapons to deal with a greater range and type of enemies.
