Shugborough House inscription
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Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England has in its grounds an 18th-century monument commissioned by Admiral George Anson, 1st Baron Anson, bearing an inscription that is thought to be an uncracked ciphertext.Contents |
[edit] The monument
The Shepherd's Monument carries a relief that shows a woman watching three shepherds pointing to a tomb. On the tomb is depicted the Latin text "Et in arcadia ego" ("I am also in Arcadia" or "I am even in Arcadia"). The relief is based on a painting by the French artist Nicholas Poussin, known itself as Et in Arcadia ego, but the relief has a number of modifications — most noticeably that it is reversed horizontally. Other differences include a change in which letter of the tomb a shepherd is pointing at and the addition of an extra sarcophagus to the scene.
Below the relief is the mysterious inscription:
O•U•O•S•V•A•V•V
D• M•
[edit] Theories
Several decryptions of the inscription have been suggested — for example, a sub-sequence of the letters apparently matches the first letters of a phrase in the Latin Bible — but due to the shortness of the ciphertext it is not possible to have any confidence in their accuracy.
[edit] Love message
A strong theory of the inscription's meaning is that it is a coded dedication from Admiral Anson to the late Lady Anson. An excerpt from a 1987 letter from Margaret, Countess of Lichfield to an independent researcher Paul Smith runs as follows:
(...) outside Rome are seven hills and one of the hills had a shepherdess called Alicia which I think means 'Joy and Happiness'. The beauty of Alicia's character was her utter simplicity devoid of all vanity. She was very beautiful and completely unselfconscious and unaware, for her whole life was dedicated to the care of her sheep and seeing they came to no harm from the roaming wolves. (...) one day I was showing some friends round the garden and when we came to the Shepherd monument I told them the story about Alicia the Shepherdess and suddenly I looked at the letters and the penny dropped, and I quoted "Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity twixt Deity and Man, thou Shepherdess the way". (...) P.S. By the way the "U" in OUOSVAVV stands for "your" because one of the "lover codes" in those days when young men scratched with a diamond on the glass of his loved ones window, he scratched "I L U" for I love you.<ref>1 Priory-of-Sion.com page</ref>
In 2004 codebreakers at Bletchley Park were briefed to look for possible solutions. One team sought explanations related to the love story. Code breaker Sheila Lawn, proposed an alternative to the Alicia poem, suggesting that the letters stand for the Latin phrase "Optima Uxoris Optima Sororis Viduus Amantissimus Vovit Virtutibus", which translates as "Best wife, Best sister, Widower most loving vows virtuously".
[edit] Holy Grail
For adherents of the modern Grail-conspiracy legend, the inscription is alleged to hold a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. Following the claims in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that Poussin was a member of the Priory of Sion and that the painting contains a message about the location of the grail, it has been speculated that the inscription may encode secrets related to the Priory. One team of Bletchley code-breakers were briefed to pursue this possibility. Oliver Lawn (husband to Sheila) proposed that the letters may encode the phrase "Jesus (As Deity) Defy", a reference to the story of the jesus bloodline allegedly preserved by the Priory.<ref>Letters remain the holy grail to code-breakers, by Neil Tweedie </ref>
Both solutions were presented by the Lawns as speculative. They are simply possible readings starting from an assumption that a particular meaning is encoded. The Lawns stated that the message is so short that many solutions are possible, and that there can be no way of determining by cryptography alone which is correct.<ref>BBC-Article about the Shugborough House inscription in relation to the Priory of Sion</ref>
[edit] Notes
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