Old runes are basically a very primitive form of encoding – they’re symbols that carry meaning only to those who know the legend, just like a public key. The Greeks used ciphers like the Scytale, which is literally a simple transposition, and that’s essentially the same idea you see in block ciphers today. But unlike modern algorithms that can be rigorously proved against brute‑force attacks, runes rely on cultural secrecy, not mathematical hardness. So while the concept of “hidden meaning” is similar, the efficiency and security of modern cryptography are a far cry from a rune‑stamped scroll.