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Cryptic Code Stumps Experts
moonboy writes "From the CBSNews.com article: 'The experts who cracked Nazi Germany's secret codes are tackling a 10-letter enigma that has stumped fine minds for more than 250 years - D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. Former code-breakers from Britain's World War II intelligence center at Bletchley Park set out this week to decipher a cryptic inscription on an 18th-century monument at an English country estate. Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail. Some believe it is a private message to a deceased beloved. No one knows for sure."
after reading the article, no one suggests that it could be complete jibberish. How do they know it's not completely random? There's people out there like myself who enough of a bastard to do exactly that to baffle people for as long as the memorial exists...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It most likely could be something like a quote, or a saying or something like that -- a lot of weird inscriptions at various sites across the world have been found to be such statements.
:)
Would be funnier still if it were a prank of some sorts, just someone's trick to drive people up the wall -- a very pissed off grandpa perhaps?
Or, it could refer to something like a name. For instance, Egyptologists supposedly saw Imhotep everywhere and were not sure what it meant. For the longest time, he was thought of as a mythological figure and only later established to be a real historical person.
But as you said, it most likely is nothing.
With respect to how much info, it could contain a lot. There is more to it than ten letters, there is the picture (a mirror image of a known painting) and placement of the letters (the D and M are not in line with the rest), and of course the other words 'Et in arcadia ego'.
Beyond that, it could even have meaning in context in other monuments in the garden or, well anything...
There could be a lot of meaning in it, or just a dedication, or some artist with a weird whim that meant nothing...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
if you had read the article, it says that it's likely to be greek or latin, or a forgotten language.
Although it is linked to a modified painting from a french artist so it could be french, and it is in england so it could be english.
Good Luck.
Welllll.... They are not trying to do a substitution cypher or anything. The idea is that the letters are a sequence of initials for words in some quotation or something.
There can't be all that many quotations, or even meaningful phrases, with two consecutive words that start with V (and three out of four contiguous words), can there? Witness the incredibly awkward attempts to come up with "joke" answers in other posts on this page. And the line of poetry is pretty awkward, too. So those V's would seem to impose some pretty strong conditions after all---giving hope that there might be a unique meaningful answer. Not much hope, though. (Still, as mentioned elsewhere, there's a lot of "side" info: the painting, etc.) We'll see.
zach
Those letters could be the makings for a magic word. During medival times it was believed that words and letters could be arranged in specific patterns to create magical affects. An example of this is the word Abacadabra, Which though funny sounding today was actually thought to posses magical powers. If you look at how it is spelled you can see a diffinite pattern A, B, A again, then C, Back to A, and so forth. I don't remember what it is supposed to do exactly. However, I do know that in order to make it work you had to write it and not say it.
Unless those V's are really Roman numerals.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There are two problems with deciphering this:
1) No one knows if it is meant to be difficult to crack, or if it is just an abbreviated message to someone who would know instantly what it meant. This is an important distinction, because it determines if solving this thing is in the domain of linguists, or of cryptographers. Linguists decipher things which are not maliciously written to be obtuse (e.g., Champollion didn't have to crack any codes to figure out Egyptian Hieroglyphs, he solved it because he knew several languages and made some educated guesses based on his cultural knowledge). On the other hand, cryptographers decipher things which *are* meant to be obfuscated. This is done primarily through mathematical analyses, rather than historical and cultural knowledge. This is the reason that no cryptographer has been responsible for the decipherment of a language. This problem has been exploited in the past, such as the famous use of Navajo in World War II to confuse German code-breakers. Cryptographers can exploit the qualities of a language (such as examining letter frequency), but they aren't even sure what language this thing is in!
2) The sample set is staggeringly small. Whether you are deciphering a language or a code, it's extremely difficult (and generally close to impossible) to do so without several different, lengthy samples. Often, people make the claim that something is "gibberish" when there's only one or two samples (as someone does in this article). This is really a baseless claim, since there are probably *dozens* of valid decipherments of anything. This is the sole reason why so many undeciphered languages have not been deciphered (e.g., Etruscan and Linear A).
When I read the summary, the first thing I thought of was the Phaistos Disk. It was found on Crete in 1908 (at Phaistos). It is a disk-shaped tablet, with strange, oddly un-Minoan, characters on both sides, spiraling in towards the center. It is even stranger because the characters appear to be stamped or pressed into the clay. (This is the earliest known example of such stamped writing.) Because the disk is so strange, many have claimed it's an elaborate hoax, but the amount of work necessary to create such a stamped tablet (making all of the stamps with which to place the characters on the disk) would mean it is a *very* elaborate hoax. Most archaeologists think it's for real, but, despite people's best efforts, no progress has been made in its decipherment. Since the sample set is so damned small (1 tablet), and since no one knows what language it's in, *and* since it is clearly unrelated to Linear A or B, there's little hope in it ever being understood. Go on Google and type in "Phaistos Disk" and you're sure to find lots of sites claiming they know the solution.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript sets even more historical precedent for the difficulty of this task, and shows that cryptographers are not successful when it comes to solving an unencoded inscription. William F. Friedman (who broke the Japanese Purple Code and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII) and some guys from the NSA have tried to decipher it, and failed. He claims it's a fake language, composed of gibberish, but it follows Zipf's law, which means it appears, based on the ratios of sign frequencies, to be real...so if someone wrote a gibberish language, they knew what they were doing to make it look real...even though Zipf, who discovered this relationship, wasn't even alive when this thing was written.
Sorry I didn't make any links, but I'm lazy, and if you type any of this stuff into Google, you'll find lots of articles.
(Wow, looks like I learned something from my Lost Languages and Decipherment course, thank-you, Professor Zimansky.)
*sigh*
It does match the letters. The word "betwixt" means "between". In this poetic case, betwixt has been shortened to 'twixt. So, that translates to:
"Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity between deity and man."
And if you read the article, you'd know that the inscription actually reads:
O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.
With the D and M lower than the rest of the inscription.
Clear now?
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Understanding the V's for greek nu, the only place the sequence of letter turns up, ignoring spaces and everything, is verse 12 of Matthew's gospel-
*meta\ de\ th\n metoikesi/an *babulw=nos *)iexoni/as e)ge/nnhsen to\n *salaqih/l (greek beta code)
Not that this is interesting, or, chances are, at all related. But it's still neat, or something. =)
Actually, there's a place in the latin as well (understanding the V's as V's). Meh. But this is neat, even if it leads nowhere.
The original painting, and a bit of information on the phrase "et in arcadia ego" can be found here (bigger version of the painting here. Note that you can't really make out the letters in either)
I first heard the phrase while studying Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in school, and our interpretation was close to one of the two on wikipedia:
"I, Death, am also in Arcadia"
This is a memento mori, a reminder that death is certain even if life seems perfect at the moment.
The painting features 4 shepherds in "Arcadia" (a pastoral paradise), puzzling over those words engraved in a small monument.
The artist of the Shugborough version may very well have intended for us to puzzle over his version like the shepherds in the original... and if the act of us puzzling over the carving was the artist's goal, there may well be no solution like there would be in normal puzzles. (Or there might only an arbitrary solution that cannot be attained without further data.)
Perhaps some poets should look at it in addition to code breakers.
While the famous version of Les Bergers d'Arcadie shows a version that is reversed from this monument, other versions were created. One version came several years before the famous one. This page shows both.
But most interestingly (and cryptically) is this image. I don't know the origin of this engraving, but it is almost exactly the same as as the monument. Down to the swirling clouds, which actually aren't present in the famous version! The only obvious difference is the present of an additional urn on top of the sarcophagus in the monument. I have little doubt that either this engraving was created from the monument, or the monument was created from this engraving.
Can anyone offer anymore insight into this engraving?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
This dredged up an old memory from Dicken's Pickwick Papes.
The section about half way down the page.
The Inscription
Those old people cracked one of the biggest, baddest encryption schemes in the history of warfare without the use of advanced computers (although they did invent some early mechanical computing machines) or a lot of information theory (Claude Shannon hadn't made his advances yet).
It's a damned shame Alan Turing is dead, but you can thank good old-fashioned British homophobia for that.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
Actually, one of the recruitment avenues that they took for Bletchley Park was weeding out the nation's best crossword solvers through a competition (http://www.historyarticles.com/bletchley_park.htm ).
> I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.
I can do it in 8:
Rennes, France, Castle, East Tower, Attic, Behind Fireplace.
.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/zelazny/212/ grail_1.html
http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/templars/temp ic10.htm
http://www.worldofthestrange.com/nlv455.html
http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/metis.htm
I looked at this for a few minutes. The chances of decyphering the meaning is very very (VERY) slim, unless you find a good reference from the period about it.
The "D.M." aparently has to do with a funeral right, in Latin, of course. I'd have to assume the rest is in Latin too. The number of latin words that the phrase could match are huge. Even if you did find a match for the phrase, which shouldn't be all that hard, it may or may not be right, without some other reference.
Our
Utterance
Omits
Some
Valuable
Assertation
Validating
Vexation
Think of the phrase (and rather obnoxious to non-christians) WWJD.
Where Would Joseph Drive?
Why Would Josie Drink?
Would Willy Just Die?
White Water Jewish Dancing.
From what I hear, it doesn't really mean any of those. Ask a Christian for the right answer.
I considered finding a latin dictionary file, and having a program run through all the possible combinations, but since I don't read latin, it wouldn't make too much sense, now would it? If it is a reference to "the holy grail", that means some of those letters probably represent cities or countries somewhere in Europe or Asia, with their name from several centuries ago.
For all we know, it's a tribute to all of someone's illigitimate children.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
But the glyph V is also often used for the letters U or W (if doubled, VV), or for the digit 5 in (mostly Latin) inscriptions, so solving the puzzle it is best treated as a character class. It might be in Greek since Arcadia is mentioned, but the tombstone's ironic and ambiguous inscription (either "I, death, am in Arcadia, too" or "I, too used to dwell in Arcadia") suggests Latin.
So we may consider V = [VWU5] as a working assumption.
Since Arcadia is where the 'goddess' Artemis was said to live, we may assume the 'D' of D and M is a lady named Diana (the Latin name for Artemis), which supports further the hypothesis that it is all Latin.
If this is so, we may extend out working assumption to A = [D].
Now could anyone please post a complete family tree of Nicholas Poussin as well as the Anson family (and others who lived at Shugborough House around the time the stone was set up? Guests, staff, etc). We would need to find all possible candidates for D and M, then define some constraints to prune the search space (e.g. solution might be a couple, i.e. sex(D) != sex(M), female(D) => male(M) or a group of either 3 or five (again, 'V') friends).
Here's an interesting picture collection to support the cryptoanalytic hunt.
As for the 'holy grail', you can easily participate in the Sunday mass tomorrow (between breakfast and reading ./), sharing the Eucharist in rememberance of Jesus with much less hassle.
When will people stop claiming it was the British at Bletchley Park who cracked Enigma? It was a group of Poles working under Marion Rejewski at the Biuro Szyfrow who beat Enigma, but not until Hans Thilo Schmidt had betrayed the Germans by providing copies of the operational manuals to Enigma, which contained enough information to decipher the internal wiring. It was not until Poland was invaded that the bombes used to decipher Enigma encoded messages were moved to England. It is true, however, that it took the resources of Bletchley Park to build enough bombes to decipher messages after the number of wheels on the Enigma machine increased.
If you look up "Anna Seward" 1747-1809, the poet who wrote the prose "of ure own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity 'twixt deity and man", you'll find her father was a canon at Lichfield Cathedral in 1757, and she was dubbed the "Swan of Lichfield".
Now go back and read the article. I don't think there's any enigma here.
The monument is the right age, the text fits, the descendants have the right story.
It was William Carlos WIlliams. e e cummings is the asshole who can't put two letters together on the same line.
Anyhow, you're both right. That is a prime example of an image poem, one which create a scene like a still life in our minds and does nothing else. However, since no image can ever exist without interpretation, it's wrong to discourage people from finding any "deeper meaning" in an image poem.
That doesn't mean it was "about sex," so much as it reminds you of sex (thought I must say this interpretation is fairly sophomoric). It reminds me that I have to mow my lawn.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
here's my theory...
2 222222
if it's a location of the holy grail (assuming it's the holy grail) then there has to be numbers, most likley a lagitude and latitude values
so here's the deal...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0000000001111111111
12345678901234567890123456
so by getting the numbers of each letter we get the following values
4 15 21 15 19 22 1 22 22 13
so now we will join each latitude/longitude value as in (latitude/longitude)
4/15 connects to 21/15 which connects to 19/22 which connects to 1/22 which connects to 22/13
after connecting these we have a sort of triangule in around central africa, and to add more interest it surrounds the country of CHAD (Map [gesource.ac.uk] and Info [gesource.ac.uk]) which has been in the news a few years ago about a discovery of the oldest skull found that might related to the human being (news [csmonitor.com].
quoting from that news:
What's more, it was found along the shores of a dry lake in the country of Chad, 1,500 miles west of the east African rift valleys often called "the cradle of humankind."
For years, lead researcher Michel Brunet has tilted mostly unsuccessfully against the long-held theory that hominids emerged from the Great Rift Valley around Kenya then spread westward across Africa and into the broader world. Now, in the hominid he has named Toumai, or "hope of life" in the local language, he has proof that the earliest prehumans covered a larger area.
interesting eh?
clepto9@excite.com
This is most likely a mistake, or a misunderstanding due to faulty translation of the original text.
What evidence do you have that this is "most likely?" And what "text" are you referring too? The term "holy grail" does not appear in Scripture. The earliest mention of anything resembling "the holy grail" is in Helinandus' Gradale around 720 A.D. Most "grail" legend is from a relatively small period in the middle ages (1180 and 1240). So any "text" you're referring too is going to be very far removed from the events in question.
Since there is ample evidence to suggest Jesus was in fact the descendant of Solomon and David, and therefore he was true Royalty
This is true.
Which is exactly why they killed him (jews did not), if he was even killed, which is not even certain and cannot be proven.
This is not true. Pilate went out of his to try to set Jesus free. Fearing a riot, he finally acquiesced and had Jesus killed. As far as Jesus' death being "not even certain and cannot be proven," what standard of proof are you looking for? You seem ready to believe, and spread, all sorts of speculation on the flimsiest of evidence. Yet you're unwilling to accept the death of Christ, which is one of the most heavily documented events in the history of the world.
So if Royal Blood is indeed the proper translation of sangraal, and due to its inherent connection with Christianity then it most likely refers to Jesus' bloodline.
Again... the proper translation of what? You're constructing a house of cards...
As is generally believed, Mary Magdalen moved to the South of France after the crucifixion...
Actually, almost no one believes this. There is an 11th century legend of Mary Magdalen going to France, but it is utterly without foundation in fact. Most likely, Mary Magdalen retired to Ephesus with the Blessed Virgin as stated by St. Gregory of Tours.
There is also ample suggestion in the gospels of Jesus being married...
Now you're just getting strange. There's no evidence what-so-ever of this in the Gospels.
It is in fact a lie concocted by religious leaders trying to obfuscate the fact Jesus was a married man with a family; being married and having children was practically required at that time and it's unfathomable that he didn't.
Again, just plain wrong. You only have to look at the writings of St. Paul:
The fact is that the Last Supper was a Passover meal. At a Passover meal there are four cups of wine consumed. Jesus lead the meal and had a cup which he shared. If the cup still exists, it's location is unknown. The legend of "the holy grai
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Rknpgyl!
V jvfu crbcyr jbhyq fgbc ernqvat zrnavat vagb rirelguvat, vg'f whfg fghcvq. Vg'f whfg yvxr gubfr crbcyr jub frr zrnavat ba Fynfuqbg cbfgf... cher vqvbpl.
Bu, naq V qrpbqrq gur Q.B.H.B.F.I.N.I.I.Z. guvatvr znwvatvr, vg ernqf LINA RUG AVBW!!!!
(V yvxr gbegvyynf, ol gur jnl)
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
I just came back here and was surprised to see the reactions to my post.
I was married to a female cop, so don't lump me with those who dislike cops. I also know a lot of cops and they're good people. Most every one I've ever met has a good sense of humor.
They will run the tag, but they'll laugh about it when they realize it's a joke. The ones I've told about the tag idea always say it would be a good joke. It's something a crook wouldn't do intentionally; they tend to want to stay away from police scrutiny.
People who own more than one car sometimes accidentally switch tags and that causes more trouble than funny tags; you could get a ticket for that.
You laugh, but have you actually tried it?
Modifying the README's sample script slightly (the garbage filter isn't letting me do the SQL statement above):
So you can actually use Google as your database! :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Assuming Jesus The Christ was indeed an earthly human being, which has yet to be substantially proven. (And even the Bible-sans-Gospels is sketchy on this)
Why would we remove the Gospels from the conversation? That's like saying, "if you remove the evidence, there's no evidence!" In any event, the remainder of the New Testament clearly demonstrates that they are writing about a real person. A few small sample: Now, you don't have to believe in it. But I don't understand how you can say that the rest of the New Testament doesn't treat Jesus as a real person. I would argue that this is all that it talks about!
Oh really? Where? Give me sources, because other than some book that may-or-may-not have been written around then, I, and many others, can't find any.
By "some book" I assume you mean the Bible. The Bible is actually a collection of books that was assembled into a single volume sometime later. But I digress. I happily refer you to the writings of the early Church Fathers. Great reading!
Oh, and by the way, if you're a Christian, get the man's name right. It's Jesus The Christ, or The Christ Jesus.
LOL! I realize that. I'm impressed by your attention to detail. Tho... The term "Christ" has long since passed into common usage to refer to the man as a proper name. I trust that you're clever enough to figure out who I'm referring too...
We don't "misunderstand" Christianity. We understand it perfectly well...you on the other hand, can't even get the name of the person you worship right.
Wow! If that's true, I would be mightily impressed. I'm spending my life actively working to understand it, and I've only scratched the surface. If you already have perfect understanding, you must truly have a remarkable mind. You'll have to forgive me a bit of sarcasm. I too used to believe that I understood Christianity, and I too enjoyed poking fun at Christians. The reason I recommend that book is that it was the first book dealing with Christianity that I ever read with an open mind. And I was stunned at what I learned and how very little I knew.
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