Early attempt to make substitution ciphers more robust, masks letter frequencies, plain text letters map...

Explanation

Homophonic Substitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher#Homophonic_substitution

An early attempt to increase the difficulty of frequency analysis attacks on substitution ciphers was to disguise plaintext letter frequencies by homophony. In these ciphers, plaintext letters map to more than one ciphertext symbol. Usually, the highest-frequency plaintext symbols are given more equivalents than lower frequency letters. In this way, the frequency distribution is flattened, making analysis more difficult.