Pillar 8

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Pillar 8 contains a non-alphanumeric encoding in a grid, and 18 lines (some of which are wavy) of letters.

Bubble Encoding

Bubble or circle encoding on Pillar 8

The 'Bubble' area of Pillar 8 is a grid of circles of two distinct sizes (small and large). The grid is 15 rows by 52 columns. Other pillars use 26 characters so it's possible the circles are paired. However, for now, I will represent the bubbles as binary with a "1" for a large circle, and a "0" for a small circle.

1110111010111011101110011010011010100101011110011011

1101010100010110000100101000101101111110101111110101

0000100000001000001000001000100010101010000000100000

1001000100010000010101000101000101010100011100000100

1101001110110110011010000011000110110110010001111101

1001010101011111010111010101011101101001100101011010

1001101010101111101010101010100101010101111111100101

0110110111010100111000111001111010111110011111001011

0000000000001000000000100000101000101000100010110010

0101010101000100010000010000000001010001010100000000

1110111010011111111011100001000110010111001100101011

1011101101101111010111111111011101111010010101110101

0110101001110010111001111001101010101010101110101001

1101110010011101100010010010100010100100111111010011

0110101010001010000010000000100010101011100010000010

This could be a 'Bacon's cipher' given the prominence of a binary form.

Alphabetic Encoding

The bottom code on Pillar 8 is an alphabetic code. It begins with plaintext that is iteratively morphed into a rail fence cipher.

The railfence cipher was solved by Matthew Bienik and posted to the Nkrypt Facebook page on 26 February 2013 with the following result:

A SIMPLE CODE TO HIDE YOUR TALES

ITS LETTERS NAILED TO DIFFERENT RAILS


A FAMOUS SCHOLAR FROM TIMES PAST

WITH COPPER DISCS ENCODED FAST


A GERMAN MONK WITH CODES SO STRONG

USED KEYS TO SHIFT THE CIPHER ON


A FAMILY DOWN THE MOUNTAINSIDE

A CABINET NOIR THEY WORKED INSIDE

The lines refer to different cipher systems, namely: Rail fence cipher, Alberti cipher disk, Trithemius's polyalphabetic cipher and the Rossignols' Great Cipher.

Base