Cipher Mysteries

In a recent Cipher Mysteries post, I mentioned Peter Aleff's theory that the Phaistos Disk was based on Senet, an Ancient Egyptian board game. All very fascinating... but something about it all triggered an old memory, one I couldn't quite put my finger on. However, when yesterday I ...

Just to break up the monotony of far too many Unknown Man posts in a row :-) , here's Anthony Svoronos' great long list of Phaistos Disk speculative theories and wobbly decipherment attempts, together with his own notes on what he suspects it is. Peter Aleff [#47 on Svoronos' list] recently left a comment here asserting: There is ...

Ex-submariner Gavin Menzies attracted global attention with his eye-catching farragos "1421" and "1434", books laying out how he imagined 15th century Chinese fleets sailed through a dried-up Egyptian canal to reach Renaissance Europe and beyond. And now he's moved onwards and backwards to the Minoans, an ancient Mediterranean civilization ...

You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby's withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first 'official' photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so "based on the letter 'W' that – ...

Just a quick note to say that I've been working behind the scenes for a few weeks on a revised Cipher Mysteries home page, incorporating a nice clickable list of what I think are the top unsolved cipher mysteries of all time, some of which you may not have heard of:- (--Top secret, yet to be announced--) The Voynich Manuscript The Anthon Transcript The Beale Papers The Rohonc ...

With my book publisher hat on, I'd guess that the pitch for this book probably said: "Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!" And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But... is it any good? Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I'll ...

A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I've been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I've been struggling to work out what I think about them... you'll see what I mean in a moment. You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini's famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively ...

This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you'd expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the 'airport novel' end of the spectrum than the 'lit-rit-cher' end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello's "God's Comic" as ...

Here's something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could "That's Life, Samara Brooks" be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I'll be sure to get a copy along the ...

Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on "hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets", hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book "Decoding The Lost Symbol"... OK, I'm sure you've rumbled the secret already: that it's basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox's book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers ...