The Barga inscription

There is a coded inscription on the outside wall of Barga Cathedral in Italy. Its meaning is not known.

Deutsche Version

Today we are talking about several encrypted inscriptions which, as far as I know, have not been described in the crypto literature before.

The graffiti inscription

Quelle/Source: Schmeh

I discovered one of the inscriptions myself, on a water reservoir between Wellendingen and Rotteil in Baden-Württemberg. This building, which is located in the middle of the forest, is secured with a fence and barred windows – after all, the drinking water supply is an important thing that also needs to be protected from terrorists. Presumably for this reason, this facility is not listed on Google Maps.

Despite these security precautions, someone must have managed to climb over the fence, because the following graffiti can be seen on the wall of the reservoir:

Quelle/Source: Schmeh

Unfortunately, the meaning is completely unclear to me. Can any reader decipher this word?

The astronaut of Casar

Another riddling inscription has thankfully been brought to my attention by Cipherbrain reader Richard Santa-Coloma. It is on a stone slab on which the so-called “Astronaut of Casar” is depicted. This slab, in turn, is on display in a museum in the western Spanish town of Caceres.

Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, I cannot show a picture of the said inscription here. There is one here. In addition, the linked article gives some background information on the subject. I think it is rather unlikely that the person depicted is actually an astronaut.

On the other hand, it seems more likely that the inscription on the plate can be deciphered – even if no one has succeeded so far. The writing is very weathered, and it is not even clear whether the letters are carved at all. It is also possible that we are dealing with random indentations that merely look like an inscription. Perhaps a reader can think of more.

The inscription of Barga

Let us now move on to the actual subject of this article. Let us go to Barga, a small town in Tuscany (Italy).

Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons

In Barga there is a cathedral on whose outer wall you can read the following inscription:

Quelle/Source: Public Domain

This inscription is easy to transcribe:

ABCDCEC
ABCDCEC
ABCDCECA

The three lines are thus identical, except that the last one contains an additional letter. It is striking that the symbol transcribed with C appears three times per line.

I didn’t know this inscription until recently and only found it a few days ago via Google. Of course I included it in my “Cryptologic Travel Guide” (programmed by Cipherbrain reader Christian Baumann). Apparently the meaning of the three lines is not known. The article linked above says that many have already dealt with this puzzle, but I could not find too many hypotheses or speculations so far – what distinguishes this cryptogram from the Shugborough inscription, for example.

My first guess is that this is a Latin term that is repeated. Spontaneously SANCTUS, SANCTUS, SANCTUS or MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA, MEA MAXIMA CULPA come to mind. Does any reader know similar expressions? Ideally one that fits the letter pattern?

There are, of course, numerous other possible explanations for this cryptogram. But why are the three lines almost identical? I hope my readers will find one or two hypotheses.

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Further reading: Wer löst die Inschrift auf dem Kryptologen-Denkmal?

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