An engineer has used artificial intelligence to crack a Napoleonic-era military code that has remained unsolved for more than two centuries.
Artificial intelligence has succeeded in decoding a message written on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte, for the first time in more than 200 years, Euronews reported.
The document was not a letter written directly by Napoleon; It came from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, and was a coded brief on the troops sent to Marmont on Napoleon's orders.
Carter Church, an engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, reported on social media that OpenAI's Astra GPT-6 model had succeeded in decrypting a message dating back to 1809 that was sent to French General Auguste de Marmont.
Church explained that the artificial intelligence model converted the image content into text for decoding within approximately six hours.
“Astra divided the tablet - which measured 1,202 in 1836 - into rows, read the symbols, determined which of the 175 hand-drawn marks represented the same symbol written twice, and only then began to decipher the code,” Church wrote in a blog post.
Many researchers have tried over the decades to reconstruct the document's content, but none will publish a complete solution to the code.
Astra handled the work from beginning to end, including transcribing the image content, analyzing the homophonic substitution cipher, writing the necessary software, and matching the information to historical records. The text revealed the locations of the Bavarian, Polish and French forces.
In 1809, Europe was steadily approaching war; Austria was preparing to confront France, while a large part of the French forces remained busy fighting inside Spain. Marmont, the commander of the French forces in Dalmatia, was in danger of being isolated if Austria launched an attack.
On March 16, Napoleon issued an order to Eugène to inform Marmont of the main locations of the French forces and their allies, stressing the need for the message to be “written in a secret code” and conveyed by a trusted officer.
The document stated: “The Russians are marching against Austria, and the strength of the Friuli army today is eighty thousand soldiers.” The document stated: “Add to this the Dalmatian Corps - not counting the reserve forces being organized everywhere in the rear lines - and you realize that Austria will be exposed to an immediate and comprehensive attack from all sides. Therefore, she is racing towards her death. When you receive the order to march, do not let a few military units or mobs intimidate you.”
Based on the decrypted troop numbers, officer ranks, and unit locations, Church re-dated the document to late March 1809, about two weeks before the Austrian forces launched their attack.
On September 18, Church published his complete research log, including the transcribed text, code tables, and scripts that allow others to reproduce and verify the results.
According to Church, Satoshi Tomokio, a Tokyo-based researcher who runs the Cryptiana website, reviewed the solution and marked the entry “Solved.”
Mahmoud Darwish was present at the Sursock Museum for more than a poetic lifetime. The man whom Simon Beaton photographed appeared in 1997, and we heard the poet who became part of Arab memory, and then his poetry sat next to Palestinian texts written after him and in a more difficult time. Between these times, the evening “Darwish and Contemporary Palestinian Poetry” created its material.
The meeting was held as part of the “Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day,” which was organized by the Pompidou Center in cooperation with the Arab World Institute, and its activities were distributed in about 30 cultural sites in France and the world within the “Mediterranean Season 2026.” The International House of Writers organized the Beirut date, and it was presented by the novelist Sherif Majdalani, one of the faces of Lebanese literature written in French, and the president of the House, and Rima Abdel Malik, the former French Minister of Culture and a long-standing presence in cultural institutions. They were brought together by a location befitting the nature of the project, in Beirut, which experienced Darwish and knew a time when Palestinian poetry was part of its cultural scene.
The film “Mahmoud Darwish: And the Land, Like Language” returned to a pivotal stage in the life of its author. Darwish in 1997 is not a poet of the beginnings for whom identity is sufficient material for confrontation, nor is he an exile waiting for the way to open. The road was partially opened, and he was able to reach Palestine after the “Oslo Accords”, the wording of which he objected to. He arrived, but did not find an end to his exile. A person may reach the place and not regain the time in which he lived.
Haifa, Cyprus, Tunisia, Amman, Paris, Cairo, Beirut, Ramallah, constitute the geography of a man who became many places after he lost the intuition of one place. Exile settles inside. A return ticket does not finish him off, because Al-Birwa, his village in the Galilee from which the child left, remained in his memory in an image that the man cannot recover.
Darwish found in language what kept his connection to the land intact after returning to it became burdened with what had changed and been lost. From the double meaning of the word “house”, the house and the house of poetry, Simone Peyton and Elias Sanbar built part of the film’s reading of Darwish’s relationship with place and language. The place, which could not be restored to what it was, remained present in the poem with its names, faces, and smells. Language did not compensate for what was lost, but it kept it from disappearing and gave memory a way to confront what time had done to place.
Palestine did not leave his poetry, but he refused to be consumed by poetry. He entered into it from mother, love, body, death, loneliness, and coffee, until the Palestinian in his poem became a specific person, not an image attached to an issue. Thus, the film was correct in Darwish’s reading, even though a defect in the clarity of the sound made following some of its parts exhausting, and lost some of the intimacy of the relationship he wanted between the voice of the poet and the viewer.
After him, there were readings by Dhana Mikhael, Rima Abdel Malik, Tariq Yaqoub, Antoine Gaspard, and Raed Tayyan, accompanied by music by Jacques Stephan, to texts by Darwish, Rifaat Al Arair, Najwan Darwish, Samar Abdel Jaber, Hind Joudah, Musab Abu Toha, Nima Hassan, Raed Tayyan, Karim Qattan, and Samer Abu Hawash.
The difference in levels of texts imposed itself on the readings. The treatment of the poetic image varied, as some texts seemed to focus more on it, while others tended to speak directly.
These selections remain too narrow to summarize the path of contemporary Palestinian poetry or the experiences of its authors. Darwish's presence among them raised the bar of comparison on its own. The poet, who spent decades distancing Palestine from direct speech, sat next to writing, some of which was born in close contact with the event, so that the tragedy seemed faster than the ability of language to transform it into poetry.
There was an aesthetic rift in the readings, more than a generational one. For Darwish, the event rarely remains the same within the poem. It was taking him away until he was bigger than the moment he left. The texts we heard remained closer to the event, especially those related to Gaza. The cruelty of what happened explains this directness to some extent, and confronts poetry with the most difficult task of finding its language in the midst of all this pain.
Overcrowding in Sursock was part of the night's picture. The hall was filled, and some visitors remained outside after it was not possible to find seats for them. They missed an event whose audience proved that poetry is still capable of filling a space and leaving others at its door.
18 years have passed since the passing of Mahmoud Darwish, and Palestine has experienced successive losses, and poets have come whose experiences were born in another world, yet his impact has not turned into a memory that can be recalled on occasions. The further away his time is, the more we find him waiting for us in our time.
