I put these together myself from the CIA Kryptos site. I believed the extra L on the vigenere side of the copperplate was a typo perpetuated online, but am not quite as sure anymore.
Ciphertext
I kept it in the rows Sanborn used. The disparity between this first and the following two grids is the unequal line lengths. The number of letters is essentially the same, see note on vigenere, but Sanborn chose to carve this one like this.
Plaintext
K4 is in bold. Probably a safe bet that if any use is to be made of the gridded text, we’ll need the translated K4 text. Please note that the “X” that Sanborn left out that changed the ending of K2 has also been left out of my grid which is a good argument for why Sanborn left it out – it literally just doesn’t fit.
Vigenere text
I based it around the vigenere-digraphical substitution table scheme. Please note that the “L” has been left off. I will attempt to find a picture confirming or denying its presence in the sculpture.*
*The Jim Gillogly site has perhaps the best pictures many of us will ever see.
As Gary Phillips pointed out, the two “halves” of Kryptos are in reversed orientation so for those interested in layering the two, here is the Vigenere in reverse position.
Always nice to have visual confirmation…at least of the left hand side gaps at the top and bottom of the vigenere tableau. Why is there a gap behind the copperplate, in the ground? Also, it is possible from Jim’s pictures that there is indeed an added L in the sculpture. If it is real and not a trick of lighting then it has some significance because from what I can see by gridding the text, it is highly, highly unlikely that Sanborn would make so obvious of a typo. I’m not 100% convinced that the L is there but there’s reasonable doubt in my mind leading me to believe it could.
Well here it is unless this was shopped by someone.
This is what I have for decifering Kryptos thus far- but I feel bits and pieces are still left unsolved. Please keep me updated!
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion it was too tally how invisible. How’s that possible? They used the Earth’s magnet field. The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location. Does Langley know about this? They should. It’s buried out there somewhere. Who knows the exact location? Only this wash is last message. Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north seventy seven degrees eight minutes fourty four seconds west layer two slowly despretely slowly there mains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway as removed with trembling hands made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then widening the hole a little inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. Can you see anything?
Good job Victoria, looks like you’ve decifered what’s been known for years.
Play nice Mona…
James Sanborn’s dad was a typesetter or something wasn’t he? Why would anyone go to all the trouble of worrying about if an M is bigger than an I or whatever and not just lay out a grid like a spreadsheet in Excel and then just fill it in. Everything fits perfect then and you don’t get this dumb line length issue.
Because Sanborn is an artist and cares about aesthetics. Fixed-width fonts (such as Courier) are good for wokring with arrays of characters but are visually unappealing. For increased readability, most fonts have different widths for different characters, and are “kerned” (meaning that they are moved sideways slightly to obtain a more even distribution of intercharacter spacing).
Do you have Gary Phillips’ Kryptos TrueType fonts that he published a few years ago? They seem to have disappeared from the web. If you do, please consider hosting them somewhere.
Nope, sorry.
Have you tried Monet, Bill Briere or Jew-Lee?
my business partner was needing a form last year and was informed about a company that hosts a huge forms library . If people are searching for it too , here’s http://goo.gl/LDoDfn