there i was hanging out at lovejoys bar in austin, basically a punk dive with homebrewed beers on tap, and my friend daud mentioned some mysterious texts he read about on wikipedia. this being austin, even the punk bars have wifi, so i whipped out the laptop and set it in the puddle of espresso chocolate stout.
the voynich manuscript. a possibly 400 year old book with an unknown writing system consisting of 20-30 unique glyphs. it just showed up in the library of a prague alchemist in the 18th century.
and once you start on the enigmatic texts, you can’t really stop.
the phaistos disk, a spiralling clay disc with an archeologically unique writing system. it was found in the basement of a palace in crete, generally considered to be just another cryptic product of those wacky minoans. but don’t worry, as soon as we get the thing decihpered, there’s already font support lined up.
oh, and another cryptic book, the rohonczi codex. this one just showed up in a donation pile to the hungarian science academy.
could be written in hungarian, maybe romanian. maybe cuman. but isn’t the whole point of writing something down, the assumption that at somepoint somebody is going to read it?
not apparently for the author of the codex seraphinus, an italian designer who just went ahead and created a new language and a base-21 page numbering system. currently undeciphered.
the wikipedia has a convenient listing of mysterious texts here.
and while we’re on the subject of mysterious artefacts, check out the antikythera mechanism.
this is the Xray of an analog computer found in the wreck of a roman ship. greek manufacture from about 80BC. those greeks were pretty damn scary.
