ORIGIN: Greece
The Scytale is an ancient cryptographic tool used to encrypt and decrypt messages in a simple and effective manner. It originated in ancient Greece and was primarily employed by Spartan military commanders and messengers for secure communication.
The Scytale consists of a long, slender rod or staff around which a strip of parchment or leather is wrapped. Both the sender and recipient possess a Scytale of the same diameter. To encrypt a message, the sender writes the plaintext across the wrapped strip, which appears as a series of seemingly random characters.