In Simon Singh’s book, The Code Book, it is expressed that “Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics.” I think this is a very true statement because cryptanalysis involves a level of mathematics and linguistics that wasn’t readily available to many people in early civilizations. The argument that amateur cryptanalysts intuitively use frequency analysis on substitution ciphers and therefore a level of scholarship isn’t needed to solve ciphers is truly invalid in my mind. One needs to realize how different modern civilization is compared to the other time periods we are comparing it to. Along with the civilization needing to reach certain levels of scholarship in mathematics, statistics, and linguistics, they also needed to have to time, energy, and willpower to sit down and try to solve ciphers. In the time of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, the normal folk were illiterate and were working very hard to just have enough food to survive. If they came across a note that looked like a code, they first of all wouldn’t have enough leisure time to try to break the code if they wanted to and they also wouldn’t be literate so they wouldn’t even know where to begin.
In conclusion, the level of education in the modern era is light years ahead of what it was many hundred years ago. One example I heard in class that made it very clear to me was that a hundred years ago, a scholar that was very specialized and on a career path towards engineering or something like that would be the only person who would even considering studying physics. In today’s world, almost every high school graduate has taken a full course in physics.