In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis aslo depended on the growth of religious sholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where thelogians scrutinized the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained in each revelation. The theory was that certain words had evolved relatively recently, and hence if a revelation contained a high number of these newer words, this would indicate that it came later in the chronology. Theologians also studied the Hadith, which consists of the Prophet's daily utterances. They tried to demonstrate that each statement was indeed attributable to Muhammad. This was done by studying the etymology of words and the structure of sentences, to test whether particular texts were consistent with the linguistic patterns of the Prophet.
( Simon Singh )
[ The Code Book: The Science of ]
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