Cryptic Masonic gravestones…

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Klaus Schmeh has just published a page on a previously unknown “Eliza” Masonic grave slab somewhere in Ohio, courtesy of Craig Bauer (Editor of Cryptologia, and who has a book on unsolved ciphers coming out next year).

Klaus’s commenters quickly worked out that it was actually the grave of Eliza Biehl (born 27th May 1862, died 2nd September 1915) buried in the Amboy Township Cemetery in Fulton, OH. It looks like this:

eliza-biehl

Klaus’s commenters quickly pointed out that the “John 3 – 16” on the left almost certainly refers to John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life“.

The right hand side is a Masonic pigpen cipher (obviously), but with a twist: it is actually enciphered from right-to-left, and so reads:

NROB
72-YAM
2681
———–
DEID
2-TPES
5191

It was actually a very nice piece of tag-team code-breaking, well done to everyone involved. 🙂

I’ve mentioned one particular Masonic gravestone back in 2008: but it turns out there are plenty of others out there, a few of which Klaus covers in this post on his site.

But here’s one he missed: that of John Farmer Dakin:-

john-farmer-dakin-pigpen

Here’s the plaintext if you’re too bone idle to work it out for yourself (it’s not hard, go on):

[—TRUSTINGODFOR—YOURSALVATION—]

Full bonus marks if you notice why this might give computer solvers a minor headache. 🙂

There are also various acrostic Masonic grave markings that occasionally turn up, such as FNDOZBTKC (which stands for “Fear Not, Daughter of Zion: Behold, The King Cometh”), and AHRHPCASDE (“And He reached her parched corn, and she did eat”).

Two More Masonic Gravestones…

But the real meat-and-two-veg of cryptic Masonic gravestones are pigpen cipher inscriptions: and so here are two more for you.

The first was from Dalkeith in Midlothian, and was cracked by amateur code-breaker Stuart Morrison. However, only really the headline of the story is on the web (i.e. no solution) and the image of the ciphertext isn’t really good enough to work with (in my opinion).

Dalkeith, St. Nicholas Buccleuch parish church. Stuart Morrison, who has cracked cipher on masonic gravestone.

If someone has access to a better quality image of this, that would be a good help. 🙂

And finally, a Freemason called Henry Harrison had some pigpen on his gravestone.

henry-harrison-cropped

Can you crack either of these? 🙂

Posted in: Freemasonry

Curious runic cipher found on a Cincinnati fence…

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A few days ago on an ‘AboveTopSecret’ online forum, user ‘NerdGoddess’ posted links to photos of a curious runic cipher her boyfriend found on a piece of paper on his fence not long before, and asked if anybody could decrypt it.

Of course, the fact that the cipher half comprises eleven miscellaneous shapes (letters & runes, all different) plus a dot would seem to make reliable decipherment unlikely, unless it just happens to be extremely close to an existing cipher alphabet. Similarly, the thirteen digits seem pretty non-specific (phone numbers and Swiss bank accounts aside), apart from the way that the first three (‘463’) are the same as the last three (‘364’) reversed.

All the same, her post provoked fourteen pages of responses (probably even more by now) ranging from the sensible to the speculative to the downright opportunistic:-
* Maybe it’s a mixture of various Futhark runic alphabets?
* Maybe it’s a phone number concealed by someone called Amy?
* Maybe it’s related to the Rushville Runestone?
* Maybe it’s written in a gang cipher?
* Maybe it’s Gnommish (from Artemis Fowl), Enochian, hobo, Roma or Pavee markings?
* ‘Dump your loser boyfriend, baby, and go out with me instead’ (Ha!)

Incidentally, the Rushville Runestone has its own nice (but thoroughly solved) cipher mystery story: found in woods near Rushville, Fairfield County, Ohio in 1972, it turned out to be a physical copy of some runes shown in a hand-drawn picture illustrating Neil Shute’s novel “An Old Captivity” (1940), and saying “Haki / Hekja”.

Back to Cincinnati: and I have to say it’s clear to me that when we look at this ciphertext, we’re supposed to think ‘cipher runes‘, in particular based on either the Elder Futhark…

…or the Younger Futhark…

Having said that, it’s basically a lousy fit for any of them. If you optimistically pick & choose letters from whichever Futhark alphabet you futharking well like, about as close as you can get is “f h e n [A] . s h [H] d t [?]”. Which is my cryptographic way of saying ‘not even close’. Put it this way: it wasn’t a runic purist who left this message. 🙂

All the same, I quite like the way that the letters seem (if you reverse them) to spell out AMY, which is why several people have proposed that the author of the note was someone called Amy, perhaps leaving her phone number in a mysterious (and steganographic) way: but there’s one last theory that hadn’t (last time I looked) yet been proposed.

You see, the other interesting thing about the digits is that few of them repeat, and all of the numbers 1-9 appear. So… what if these digits are the key to a transposition cipher? That is, what does the bottom line become if its shapes are transposed in the order given in the top line? Here’s what it looks like before transposition (admittedly not 100% sure)…

…and after transposition…

The nice thing about doing this is that the dot gets transposed to the very end of the cipher, which would seem to provide weak confirmation we’re going in the right direction. But… what does it say? If you squint, does it say “TO MY WITCH WA.”? Curious, and very possibly wrong, but perhaps this might be enough to help someone to recognize the kind of cipher being used here and to decrypt it more reliably. Enjoy!

Posted in: Historical Ciphers

Voynich project at the Big Walnut Science Fair…?

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Jacob Collard, a sophomore at Big Walnut High School (in Delaware County, Ohio), put together a Science Fair project entitled “Comparison of Grapheme Frequencies and Locations in Undeciphered Voynich Script and Geographically Similar Languages“. This so impressed the judges that he was asked to take it forward to the Central District Science Day at Columbus State Community College, where he won the “Best Linguistics Project for a High School Student Award” (according to this page). Congratulations to him!

Jacob now has four weeks before the “60th Annual State Science Day […] on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University” – if he’d like someone to cast a Voynichological eye over his work and perhaps suggest some fixes or improvements before May 9th, I’m sure I could find a ready volunteer. 🙂

Hmmm… how long before teachers start using the Voynich Manuscript in junior school to teach children how not to do history? It can be more valuable to know what to avoid, wouldn’t you say? 😮

Posted in: Historical Research, Voynich Manuscript

Vinland Map latest…

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Two up-to-the-minute papers on the Vinland Map (the Beinecke’s other “VM”) for your delectation and delight.

Firstly, a 2008 paper by Garman Harbottle called “The Vinland Map: a critical review of archaeometric research on its authenticity” in Archaeometry, 50, pp.177-89 – this tries to discredit / undermine the analytical & spectroscopic chemical analyses of the Vinland Map by McCrone (1974) and Clark (2004).

And secondly, a late-2008 paper by Kenneth Towe, Robin Clark and Kirsten Seaver that seeks to vigorously rebut Harbottle’s rebuttal (and, indeed, appears to succeed).

Much as I would like the tricky fragments of cipher on the Vinland Map (as best described by James Enterline) to be a genuine piece of late medieval cryptography (after all, this is a cipher history blog), and even though I suspect Towe, Clark and Seaver might have overreacted somewhat to Harbottle’s paper, the science currently does seem to be more on their side than on his. Hmmm… I really ought to review Kirsten Seaver’s (2004) book “Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vínland Map” (where she names her suspect as Joseph Fischer, though her argument has been criticized for lack of evidence) here soon… so much to read, so little time. Oh well! 🙁

For a recently updated (and generally very comprehensive) online discussion of the Vinland Map, I heartily recommend J. Huston McCulloch’s Vinland Map webpage.

Posted in: Beinecke Library, Vinland Map

Voynich miscellany, once again…

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Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing for a mere $2.

And here’s Thomas Maska’s Avallaen font, inspired by Voynichese lettering: he made it for his conlang [constructed language], also called Avallaen, supposedly “spoken by approximately 35 million people on the northern end of Escerna, a massive volcanic continent in the N’ra Teoi (Great North Sea).” I quite like the way the digits are formed from gallows with different numbers of bars. Oh, and don’t forget, ägloinniyüvoih pōvlen üevs erüs.

Onwards to the fine arts: and I’d have liked to show you an image of Danielle Rante’s mixed-media drawing called “Voynich Secret History” here (this won the 2008 Ohio Arts Council Professional Award), but she didn’t return my email. Oh well!

And there was a 2005 piece similarly called “Voynich Secret History” (though this was a 4-5 minute film by artist Katherine Parker). Her interests include:” the redemption of kitsch, archetypes, and Märchen (German fairytales)“. Yes, I’d say most of the stuff that’s written on the VMs does read like almost-unredeemably-kitsch German fairytales, so perhaps she’s touching on a deeper truth here. 🙂  Her description of the film is that “Dormant plants, winter snow, steam, and drawings based on the Voynich Manuscript are metaphors for latent, hidden and lost knowledge“. All of which sounds rather pleasant, & perhaps one day I’ll see that too…

Enjoy! 🙂

Posted in: Herbals, Voynich Manuscript ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,