shugborough inscription

bogwalrus

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?


This is great fun:D