Supposedly one of the hardest ever codes that all the great minds have failed to crack.
The Shugborough inscription is a sequence of letters - O U O S V A V V, between the letters D M -carved on the 18th-century Shepherd's Monument in the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England, below a mirror image of Nicolas Poussin's painting, the Shepherds of Arcadia. It has never been satisfactorily explained, and has been called one of the world's top uncracked ciphertexts. [1] The inscription became widely known after being mentioned in the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
I don't care so much about the conspiracy nonsense but more about the code/puzzle itself.
I am amazed at how much fun I have had playing around with possibilities.
The first thing I did is use oy arrak ab latin anagram generator to come up with some phrases using all letters.
there is only three possibilities:
avum vos v do
avum vos v o d
dum avo vos v
The most interesting one translate to the following:
Grandfather of five, I give you
this was pretty cool and so I decided to try a different angle using numbers.
I translated all letters other than D & M to their number counterpart while translating the v to their numeral number 5 as that just made sense to me and got:
15. 2 .15 .19. 5 .1 .5 .5
The next obvious step for me was to re translate each number back to a letter keeping in mind the numeral v to 5 and get:
A V B A V A I V A V V
There is 3 interesting Latin anagrams that translate to the following:
M vada avi ab v
The bird from the shallows
Viam vada ab v
The way the water from the...
vim vada ab v a
The force of the water from the....
In order to get an anagram from the above letters I needed to leave out the two Roman numeral v's so maybe they come into play elsewhere using the D & M maybe?
