I was recently sent a fascinating (and, at 88 pages, substantial) dossier by François Parmentier on the Plougastel-Daoulas inscriptions. It’s a very pleasant read (François is much to be applauded), and has pretty much everything you might need to bring you up to speed on the mystery surrounding these strange inscriptions. He also examines many of the assumptions and ‘Internet wisdom’ on the inscriptions, and finds them not to be true.

Because the dossier is in French, I’ve appended my translation of the first few pages below: I’ve omitted discussions of the entropy, index of coincidence and discussions of ciphers. What remains in the dossier largely consists of tables and annexes, which anyone interested should be able to easily follow.

The downside – which you may already have guessed – is that none of the lines of enquiry he follows leads anywhere particularly solid. But in many ways that also (I think) means that François should be commended on his transparency – this openness means his research loss becomes everyone’s gain. 🙂

Incidentally, one idea for future work suggested right at the end of the dossier is to look at gallo (the Vendée patois). This is because even if the Sacred Heart turns out (as is possible) to be linked to the Chouannerie, François found no “use of the Sacred Heart on the part of Breton Chouans: to my knowledge, only the Vendeans adopted it“.

Anyway, one final round of thanks to François Parmentier: and now on with my normal free-wheeling translation. All mistranslations are mine, etc. Enjoy!

Nick’s Translation of the First Few Pages…

This document does not pretend to precisely decrypt the inscription left on the rocks at Anse du Caro. Rather, its purpose is to attack the problem as rationally as possible, and in a logical sequence. Hence Part I contains information concerning the inscription; Part II the result of an automated analysis of the inscription; and Part III a theory / attempted decoding leading (…or not) to a meaningful plaintext. However, given that things become more uncertain as the pages proceed, Part IV consists not of answers but of perspectives and provisional conclusions.

Maybe one of the attempts made here will prove to be a way in to the mystery of this inscription; or maybe not. Or perhaps the data presented here will help other researchers determine the inscription’s meaning. Anyway, I present this file to the (virtual) jury, hoping that it brings it much to reflect upon.

Part I. Givens of the problem

I.1. Historical-geographical context

In order to avoid overburdening this (already substantial) file, here is a brief summary:

  • Geography:
    • Coordinates: 48 ° 34 ’50 “20 ‴ N, 4 ° 44′ 41” 06 ‴ W;
    • The rock is near the Anse du Caro, a few hundred meters from Ilien-en-Traoñ, on the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula in Brittany.
  • History:
    • Unknown date of creation: all the same, it has become conventional to ‘read’ three dates on the rock: 1787, 1786, 1771 (with the implication that one should select the last of the three as the most probable candidate date of creation);
    • 1920: apparently inscribed by a Russian soldier;
    • 1979: Bernard Tanguy mentioned the inscription to the Société Archéologique du Finistère ;
    • 1984: Article by Yves-Pascal Castel in the Bulletin de la Société Archéologique. Presentation of a first transcription;
    • May 2019: Launch of a decryption contest, after several approaches to specialists yielded nothing.

I.2.Transcription of the text

As mentioned above, the first transcription of the inscription was made by Yves-Pascal Castel in 1984; a second attempt was provided by the Mairie in the recent competition documentation: they both appear, commented, in Appendix 3. Using the photographs provided by the town hall and those on Internet, and with the overlaps made with these two previous transcriptions, what follows below is a new transcription: this is what we will primarily work with throughout this document.

The transcription is presented as follows: on the left is a text identifier of the text, consisting of a letter designating the rock and a line number. More information on the numbering system is in Annex 2. Underscores indicate one or more indecipherable letters; the paragraph shows that the inscription does not begin to the very left of the rock, but is (more or less) right justified.

A1 GROCAR

A2 dREAR DIOƧEEVbIO

A3 ARVREOИEƧLAΘhVEC

A4 PEИ AbEИEИEƧΘI8ƧE +

A5 ИbICEИG

A6 _OAИI EKGE 

A7 AƧOMGAROPA ɣCDO’FET

A8 dAR OA

A9 O I E EM __ GEM E JAIEJ

A10 IVEL AChEODCET DA-AOMA

A11 CVLES ELdA RE IdIMEVƧMEƧ

A12 I __R ER

A13 AR PRIGIL O d11(Coeur orne d’une croix)81

A14 ObIIE bRIƧbVILN EROIAL

A15 ALVO4 ARbORSIV_T

A16 CARCLO IVE PRE Ƨ T

A17 VƧOИ REƧ E_____ I

A18 VA_Ƨ 1920

A19 ƧdARANdOC

A20 AdREIRIO

A21 I186 ИEIƧ

B1 Ƨh_

B2 AND PIN

B3 _A_AИ

B4 _A_VET

B5 _AM__

C1 ____A

C2 _ PRET

C3 OR

C4 ONE_AИ_ __

D1 __E_

D2 O

D3 VET

D4 I__T

E1 __OИR

E2 __RIC

E3 __R_

E4 __CE_

There are, of course, many obstacles to a ‘perfect’ transcription of this inscription.

All things considered, some spaces and even some lines are highly debatable (see A. A8). Similarly, various signs that are interpreted here as falling in the same category could well be distinct: I do not differentiate between the small raised o (1. A10) and the full-size O (A13); nor between a sans-serif vertical line (1. A2) and a similar vertical line with serifs at the ends (1. A13); or between a very clear and straight V (A1) and another more curved specimen (beginning of 1. A11). Some decisions had to be taken during this transcription, particularly with the difference between “IV” and “N”: here, three criteria were used – the junction between the I and the V, the inclination of the two characters, and their (relative) size.

I also find the question of the dates (allegedly) observed very difficult, because I do not see the elements mentioned in the previous transcriptions. The date around the heart in A13 (if it is indeed a date), seems to me to be “1181”, because all 1-shapes have a serif at the top turned to the left, and have no middle bar. I see the same-shaped character in the second l on A21, while the first has no serif at all: hence I transcribed that as I.

Thus, if the analyses carried out on this transcription fail, it could well be because specific transcription choices I made were faulty. In this case, it would therefore be necessary to provide a finer-grained transcription, which should take into account the size and orientation of the characters, the presence (or absence) of serifs, etc. To do this, a trip to the rocks themselves would probably be necessary, to touch (like Saint Thomas) the signs and thereby better understand them. In particular, one might use such an opportunity to examine some particularly intriguing characters:

  • The final C of line A3, which is very angular but lacks a middle bar (i.e. to make an E);
  • The beginning of the A4 line;
  • The possible presence of characters before the inscription of line A5;
  • The apostrophe in A7 (hapax) might simply be an I belonging to the line A6

I.3.Typical elements of the inscription

Apart from numbers, the text contains three non-alphabetic elements:

  • A discreet, non-stylized cross (A4);
  • What is commonly characterized as a left-facing crescent moon (1. A6);
  • A heart surmounted by a cross (L. A13).

Unfortunately, we can deduce little about the first two of these, given that they are so generic. The cross might simply be an addition sign, or might follow a religious text (as, from time to time, crosses appear inserted in the text in breviaries). The crescent – if it is really a crescent – could be an astrological / astronomical symbol, and thus would give us no further help.

The most intriguing of these symbols is therefore the heart surmounted by a cross, commonly associated with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Devotion to the heart of Christ is an old tradition, but one that grew considerably in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, thanks to saints such as Jean Eudes and Marie Alacoque. In 1670, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, nineteen days after Pentecost, was instituted in the diocese of Rennes: this was extended throughout France and then to the entire Church. In the Plougastel inscription, the representation of the Sacred Heart would therefore seem to fit well with the traditional reading of the dates 1787 (1. A13) and 1786 (1. A21).

Later on, the Sacred Heart becomes the emblem of the Chouan royalist uprising, which took place in Brittany; this symbol remains the current emblem of the Vendée. Personally, I consider this link quite likely, because it is so strongly iconic, even if it does pose a question for those who believe the traditional reading of dates on the inscription, because 1786/1787 were 7/8 years before the whole Chouannerie episode began. Note that the reading of the above-mentioned dates raises questions for another reason: if we assume that the last line (1. A21) gives the date of writing of the text, the dates on line A13 designate years which had not yet happened. This would hence have to be a prediction or some vision of the future: unless, of course, they are simply nothing more than just dates.

Finally, there is also the engraving on rock E (if I’m not mistaken), commonly referred to as the “sailboat”. In truth, though, the engraving is not very legible, and shows mostly straight lines converging towards the same point. To make interpretation even more difficult, the rock seems broken close to the base of the engraving. As a result, this detail, although possibly critical, remains largely unusable.

Part II – Analyses of the Inscription

II.1. Frequency analysis

  • 32 characters: 25 alphabetical, 4 digits and 3 typographic symbols;
  • Most of the alphabet is Latin and capitalized, but has some non-Latin characters: Ƨ, И, d, b, h, Θ and ɣ;
  • The 10 most frequent characters: E, A, R, I, O, Ƨ, V, C, I, L (73.03%
    cumulative frequency).

II.2. Algorithm for Determining the Vowels

Several algorithms exist to determine which characters in a text are vowels or consonants: but none is infallible. The best known is probably that of Sukhotin: here, I use Mans Hulden’s OCPb algorithm (Obligatory Contour Principle based), posted online by its author. This algorithm is very effective – it yields only 7 errors when analyzing a corpus of 503 languages.

Overall, it seems that vowel letters do indeed refer to vowels and consonants letters to consonants;

  • Among the special characters, the OCPb algorithm classifies h and ɣ as vowels, and Θ, Ƨ, И, b and d as consonants;
  • The characters 1, 8, 6, K, F, h, + and ‘ are very unstable according to the algorithm, the variant and the corpus used;
  • On the contrary, the stable letters are: A, E, I, O, ɣ (vowels); Θ, S, N (coronal consonants); J and L (non-coronal consonants).

II.3. Phonotactic analysis

Phonotactic analysis describes the probabilities that one letter is followed by another for each of the characters used in the alphabet.

The analysis has been conducted here on two different corpuses: one with the transcription spaces proposed above, the other only interpreting the line-ends as spaces. In all cases, unknown characters have been replaced by spaces. The results obtained appear in Appendix 5; the salient points are:

  • 3 repetitions of letters: 11, EE and II;
  • Vowel groups (identified in II.3) are: EE, EO, EA,
    EI, EK, OA, OI, AO, (AA), Al, (Aɣ), IE, IO, IA, II, hE;
  • The bigram “AR” is strangely frequent;
  • The letter T always appears at the end of the word.

Thanks to the kindness (and keen photographic eye) of Cipher Mysteries commenter Françoise who visited the Plougastel-Daoulas site just a few days ago, I’m delighted to pass you all her great set of photographs. As always, feel free to click on them to see a higher-resolution version.

Setting the Scene…

The Anse du Caro is on the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula, opposite Brest (in Brittany).
The part of it we’re interested is a little bit around the bay from any houses.
The cliffs go quite sharply upwards here: you can see heaps of rock fragments at the base.
The particular carved rocks we’re interested in are (if I understand correctly) nestled in near the bottom of a cliff.

The Main Carved Rocks

I’ve included all the photos of the main carving. Make of them what you will.
Thanks very much, Françoise! 🙂
There’s not much more useful I can say at this point, so I’m going to let the photos do the talking for a bit. 🙂
You can clearly see that the tide rises up to cover these carvings, which might well suggest that this was not their original position.

“Anddin”

Curiously, there are a number of other carvings on adjacent rocks, which I suspect would need to be understood at the same time as the main rock.


This carving seems to say “ANDDIN”, albeit upside down, and with the last letter being the typical backwards N / Cyrillic I.
Same carving but without the legs in the corner.

“PRET”…?

This quite clearly seems to say “PRET”. Though the rock may well be too heavy to carry easily.
PRET again, slightly different angle.

The Boat…?


Maybe this is an upside-down boat, maybe it’s not. I’ll leave it to others to decide.

The Last Few Carvings

This final picture might be the most interesting one of the batch, because it seems to directly support the idea that the carvings were all originally made higher up the cliff, and that coastal erosion / geological activity has caused them to break up and fall down.


With this in mind, it seems likely to me that there may well be many more carvings at this site still waiting to be found, and that there was originally a higher-order structure connecting them all.

At to what that structure actually was / what it was for / who it was by / what language it was in, I still have no useful idea. But all the same, it’s pretty interesting, hmmm?

Thanks again, Françoise, you are a Cipher Mysteries star! 😉

I mentioned this mysterious stone here a few days ago, since when the story has been picked up by many more news outlets, largely justifying the mairie‘s decision to put a 2000 euro price on its head, it would seem.

And so I, like probably many others, emailed through a filled-out form to say I’d like more information: and received a link to a 12MB PDF, which
contained mainly photos of the rock in question.

Société Archéologique du Finistère

It also contained a copy of what may well be the only time this stone has been discussed in some kind of journal or book. This was (as I suspected) the Bulletin of the Société Archéologique du Finistère, which has a long-running kind of ‘mop-up’ feature entitled “Monuments et objets d’art du Finistère. Études, découvertes, restaurations“, for small items that don’t quite merit a full article. I don’t know precisely which Bulletin this is, but from the page numbers visible in the copy (pp. 332 and 333), I’d guess it was the 1979 Bulletin (it certainly can’t be any earlier).

Here’s what it says:

PLOUGASTEL-DAOULAS
Anse du Caro

Une inscription énigmatique du XVIIIe siècle

                Après bien des hésitations, nous livrons le relevé d’une longue inscription gravée en creux sur des rochers au nord de l’anse du Caro, dans la presqu’île de Plougastel-Daoulas. Elle nous a été signalée en 1979 par Bernard Tanguy. Nous communiquons ce que nous avons pu en relever, dans l’espoir que quelque membre de la Société y exerce sa sagacité, afin que l’on puisse obtenir des éclaircissements, comme cela a été le cas pour l’inscription de Guengat (cf. supra).

                Les coordonnées de l’inscription du Caro, selon la carte I.G.N. au 1/25000, sont les suivantes : X : 098 00, Y : 094 15, soit à 500m, à vol d’oiseau, à l’ouest de village d’Illien-an-Traon. On peut, à marée basse, suivre la côte vers le nord en partant de l’anse du Caro, et repérer les rochers entre la pointe qui s’avance dans la mer et la falaise.

                Sommairement gravée en caractères dont la majorité est en capitales, il ne fait pas de doute q’elle est en langue bretonne. Vieille de deux siècles, le rocher sur laquelle on la lit s’est débité sous l’action des marées, plusieurs signes sont érodés et la surface de la pierre est éclatée par endroits.

My rough-and-ready translation:

An enigmatic inscription from the eighteenth century
After much hesitation on our part, here is a record of a long[-ish] carved inscription found on the rocks in the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula, north of Anse du Caro. This was first reported to us by Bernard Tanguy in 1979. We hope that, by publishing here what we have been able to discover, some member of the Société will apply his or her sagacity to it, so that we can gain greater clarity, as indeed happened for the Guengat inscription (cf. supra).

The coordinates of the inscription du Caro, according to the 1/25000 scale I.G.N. [Institut Géographique National] map, are as follows: X: 098 00, Y: 094 15; this is 500m west of the village of Illien-an-Traon as the crow flies. If, at low tide, you follow the coast northwards along from Anse du Caro, you should be able to locate the rock between the tide-line and the cliff.

Looking at the lightly engraved in characters (of which the majority are capitals), there is surely no doubt that this is written in the Breton language. Two centuries on, however, the rock on which it was carved has been damaged by the action of the tides, several of its glyphs have been eroded away, while in places the surface of the stone is smashed up.

The First Transcription

We have two basic sources for the inscription: the version that appeared in the Bulletin (just after the above-translated text), and the hand-written version that appears in the mairie‘s PDF. Firstly, here’s the SAF version:

ROC AR B…
DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH
AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL… R I
… GENBICEN DA BEN ESOA… S E
DIASBOANT…
…EKGES…
BO…FET
DAR
ASOMGAROPA
VARLAEOERIATQDAO
NELACIEOD – ET… F… AOMA
CVLESEDAREIDIMEVSMES
ARPRIGILOD1787
(coeur et croix) OBIIE: BRISBVILAR… FROIK… AL
…ALVOA ARBORSINET
CARCLONEPR ES (SAKI) ASONRES E I BEL
(ANNDDIN) VMS
… (ABAN) SDARANDOC (SAOU) ADREIRIO
(FAN) 1786 NEIS
… CL…
… DOS…
SARMIS – UT
177IMESO
EMGAR
DALOTOGREC
TRE: C-N

D’une autre main, la date de 1920…

All the same, I have to point that this SAF transcription isn’t really doing justice to the lettering on the rock. For a start, the first letter resembles a lower case ‘d’ more than a ‘D’; several of the letters seem to have backwards ‘N’ shapes; and so forth.

Even so, this first transcription was (without much doubt) done in good faith some years ago, and we must be aware that the process of cleaning it up and preparing it for public view in 2017-2019 may possibly have added a layer of interpretation to these carvings that wasn’t originally there.

As an aside, Bernard Tanguy is without doubt the Brittany historian who was for many years president of the SAF, so it is hardly a surprise that he chose to pass his discovery on to its members. He may well have also photographed this mysterious rock when he first encountered it, but I don’t know if this particular angle has been pursued by anyone.


Bernard Tanguy, (1940-2015) – photograph fromLe Telegramme, 2015

The Second Transcription

In the following version of the hand-transcription released by the mairie, I have rendered the back-to-front ‘N’ as the Cyrillic capital I (i.e. ‘И’), and the back-to-front ‘S’ as ‘Ƨ ‘ (the Unicode character 01A7), etc. All of which is not perfect, sure, but it’s perhaps tolerably close:

GROCAR
dREAR DIOƧEEVbIO
ARVRFOИEƧLAΘENEL
PEИ AbEИEИEƧΘ182E
GEИbICEИG
EKGE (left-facing crescent moon shape)
AZOMOARΘ PA ꙋCDOFET
dAROA
AIELAChEODCET DA AOMA
CVLESELDdA RE IdIMEVƧMEƧ
ARPRIGILOd17(cross on top of a heart)87
ObIIE bRIƧbVILA
ALVQ4AKbORSIV . T
OSCARCLOIVEPRE 2 . T
ZOИREZE
VAR
dARAИdOL
AdREIRI9
1786 ИE12

Scans of the Mysterious Rock

I’ll finish up by illustrating the above with some example scans cropped from the mairie‘s kindly-provided set, so you can perhaps get a better idea of what we’re up against here.

Enjoy!

(Thanks very much to VViews for passing this story my way, much appreciated!) The original French article appeared in Le Télégramme, though behind a paywall (boo!). So here’s my free-and-easy English translation:

It is a rock that has intrigued Michel Paugam, councillor of Plougastel (29) for several years. In order to solve its mystery, the municipality is this month launching a national call for applications.

On a rock not far from Anse du Caro in Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany is carved (what looks like) a message that begins “grocar drear diozeevbio …“, followed on by other strange writings. This text is further embellished with no-less-enigmatic drawings: a heart linked to a cross that might evoke the Chouans of the Vendée stranded in the peninsula, a sailboat close to the sea licking the base of the engraved rock at high tide…

Of the numbers on the rock, only two seem to be obviously decryptable: 1786 and 1787. These correspond to the construction years of the nearby Fort du Corbeau and of other batteries that protect the harbour. But that’s all! So far, no satisfactory translation has emerged, despite its having been shown to associations, organizations, and various brainy people. The only thing we can be certain of is that during the First World War, a Russian soldier in the garrison added the date of 1920 to the original message. Naturally, contacts were made with Russia, thinking that understanding Cyrillic might provide some answers: but once again, the riddle remained unanswered. The mystery is such that some have suggested calling it “le mystère Champollion à Plougastel-Daoulas” (in tribute to the Rosetta Stone).

Hence a national contest has now been launched to try to solve this enigma: the municipality has launched an appeal to linguists, historians, students, academics, enthusiasts and enthusiasts of all of l’Hexagone to finally understand the text and, thus, its history. Running until the end of November 2019, this “mystère Champollion” competition will allow entrants to submit their research in the form of reports to be analyzed by a jury composed, among others, of academics and a representative of the service départemental d’archéologie. A prize fund of € 2,000 will be distributed by the jury, though without the participants being able to claim any remuneration or compensation. To find out more, to learn about the terms of participation and the rules or to visit the site (or ask for photos), contact : [email protected]

Yes, I can already see the possible connection with the mysterious (and quite probably 18th century) rock carvings found in Mauritius. But let’s just start with getting better scans and see where we go from there, hein?