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Does anyone recognize any of these symbols?

UncleMatt said:
Feel free to start another thread...
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Sorry, was not trying to hi-jack your thread. (PatrickD gave good advice, rest may be combination signs, etc)
Would start the new thread pertaining to the Spyder Rocks,...heck do not remember how to start a new thread since the change-over on this site.
(Hoofer: Thanks for the reply, sounds true to me,...opened more questions than you answered...love that...now trying to remember if I met you down in Texas 20 plus years ago.)

Oddrock
 

oddrock said:
Sorry do not know of one available. Been wanting that for years. Probably too many variations for it to work all the time...

Oddrock
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Seems like one of those software geniuses could take a good OCR software and modify it to catalog the language.
 

dsty said:
UncleMatt It was my opinion that they were in seperate locations and assumed that they may be initials, as far as I know they could be cattle brands.
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I have contacted a lady in Laplata County who is an expert on arbor glyphs and cattle brands in SW Colorado. The idea that some of these symbols might be brands occurred to me as well, and I am following up on that.
 

Shortstack said:
Seems like one of those software geniuses could take a good OCR software and modify it to catalog the language.
Click to expand...
I was watching a show the other night called America Unearthed. While it was kind of a joke of a show, they did show optical character recognition software being used by a university that scanned characters on an object and then ran them through a database of known language letters and symbols. That is what I need here!
 

Hi Matt,

I am actually working on a similar project now. It will be quite an undertaking but having developers working on it. It will be put online as a free resource when it is done.

Patrick
 

Well hurry up Patrick! j/k

I believe there is already such software out there with every symbol ever used in our recorded history, all the way back to Babylon. I will be asking around UNM tomorrow about this.
 

That would be helpful. Let me know what you find out.
 

Treasure signs and Symbols

Patrick..

I have some interesting treasure signs and would like you to held with identification. According to my research, there could be a treasure at the site., Will you be able to help?

Thanks

Relict Hunter
 

Hi,

185 characters over 11 lines definitely looks like a cipher to me. Can you tell me how many distinct characters are represented? If you can come up with a tally of the number of symbols and the frequency each symbol is represented, you may get some indication of what you are looking at.

Without looking at the text itself, obviously I could not solve it, but I might be able to lead you to a solution -- especially if it's a direct transfer from a look-up table, which it likely would be.
 

Hey All, I have been buried this summer with work, and just got back from a treasure hunt vacation up in the high country around Durango area. I worked with an archivist at UNM to restore and open a newspaper from 1893, and hope to find someone there soon who can help me with the Optical Character Recognition software. If anyone knows of a university or company that could help me on that, please post all about it.

I have not worked on this inscription for a few months, but as winter gets closer I will spend more time on it. Too much to do outside at the moment! I have no tally of characters, or anything like that, but will create one. It is frustrating having my hands tied somewhat by my promise to the Temple Cornelius family that I would not share the inscription with anyone without their permission. Please understand where my limitations are on that front.
 

I'll just post this up so it's here when you get around to it. First off, I assume what you are looking at is a Paristocrat Cipher (that is, a Cryptogram with the spaces removed), based on the information. Usually people will use one encryption method, so, if there is a lookup table, it is probably straight lookup (you could, for instance, make your plaintext a vignere and then encode the vignere with a lookup table, but this is uncommon). As you have not mentioned spaces in the glyphs, which would suggest to YOU that it is a cipher, I assume Paristocrat, and would attack from that angle first.

First steps I would do to solve a paristocrat cipher is to run a frequency tally, as mentioned. If you have less than 26 unique characters, I would assign a new CAPITAL letter to each. If more, assign some numbers or keyboard symbols (eg. !,@,#).

With that done, try running the transliterated text through Decrypto 8.5, Online Cryptoquip and Cryptogram Solver in Paristocrat mode. Go through all the texts that the website provides. Usually the site will not get the cryptext correct, but may contain some good hints that you can work with. If it's all gibberish there, there may be two issues -- it's not a paristocrat, or it's not English.

To solve a paristocrat by hand, you'd generally start by changing letters to text based on letter frequency. That is, your most common two letters should be E & T. You next four most frequent should be A, O, I and N. Start moving letters around and see if you can make some words happen. Usually I start with most frequent = E, and the second most frequent should be T and, hopefully, I can find the T somewhere two letters before the E, which shows me an H. Work forwards from there. The letter frequencies (in order) for english are ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFGYP (ETAOIN SHRDLU should comprise most of the letters, after which the frequency counts will be too low to worry about matching the rest of the letters based on frequency). I use capital letters for encrypted text and lowercase for solved text. Using search and replace in wordpad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac) makes this pretty easy... just make sure you are respecting letter case in the Find/Replace.

If your cryptext is not English, the tally may help compare against other languages. This site may help for getting your frequencies from your transliteration: English text analyzer

If your cryptext is not a Paristocrat, this site may help: Cipher Statistics

If you want to read some fun fiction regarding the Paristocrat, you may enjoy:
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug"
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/gold_bug.html

Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure Of The Dancing Men"
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/AdveDanc.shtml
 

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I wouldn't assume anything on this inscription. It may be as you surmise, but if it is genuine, it may be any number of ciphers. I sincerely appreciate your posts though, and keep the info coming! I will post more as I have it to post.
 

UncleMatt said:
I wouldn't assume anything on this inscription. It may be as you surmise, but if it is genuine, it may be any number of ciphers.
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This is, of course, absolutely true. But we can also probably rule out a number of modern hand ciphers, such as double transposition, straddling checkerboard, trifid, ADFGX, etc. Luckily, 185 characters is quite a bit of information to run with, and will be enough to tackle for most crypto-systems. Something like an double-encoded Vignere wouldn't put up much fuss either. Playfair, a little tougher, but possible (we just assume there is no methodology in the tableau). Double-encoded grille cipher would be nightmarish -- but the encoder would need to also keep track of both keys (and we'd probably expect a table, where a 185 character table is necessarily 5x37, which doesn't work well) .

At any rate, in the (paraphrased) words of Helen Fouché Gaines, don't sit around second-guessing a method of attack. Just start attacking.
 

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I wish I had more information about how old this inscription is! Or even where it is located, so I could try to date it. All I have is a letter from the Secret Service to Temple Cornelius' father-in-law in 1936, with a handwritten copy of the inscription enclosed. I am going to initiate a FOIA request to see if the government has anything else on this. But I have no way of knowing what grid system, if any, the author of the inscription utilized at this point.

And I never said anything about 28 characters. :-)
 

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Hi Relichunter63,

Yes, I am getting caught up and can dedicate some time to a new project.

Patrick
 

Hey guys, I noticed a barely disguised French word in the inscription: campais. Assuming of course that it isn't a coincidence, and that it says something else in code. I was thinking this was Spanish in origin, but after reading the local history of Pagosa Springs, more than one French expedition, not to mention many French explorers, focused on this area for gold prospecting. So maybe this inscription was put in place by someone other than the Spanish.

Sorry again for slow progress on this, just juggling a lot right now.
 

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