| Alistair 2008-02-02, 9:58 pm |
| On 31 Jan, 01:12, "HeyBub" <hey...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alistair wrote:
>
>
> It's getting worked out. One of the more interesting endeavors was a British
> Serving Officer in India who, as an amateur, puzzled over the contradictions
> in the geneologies of the Hebrew Kings. Until he worked it out, scholars had
> dismissed the chronologies as scribal error or mistake.
>
> Here's what this officer (whose name escapes me) figured out:
> 1. The beginnings of the year were different in the kingdoms of Judea and
> Israel. One group started their year on Rosh Hashannah, the other on
> Passover.
> 2. Some kingships started their reign with a year zero, others started
> numbering at one, some didn't start either number until the new year
> (whichever calendar was in use).
> 3. Sometimes there was a co-regency - a son and father ruled concurrently,
> so the twelfth year of the father may have been the third year of the son.
>
> Anyway, applying all these fudge-factors (almost all with sufficient
> justification), the linage of the Hebrew Kings made sense.
>
> Here's another story you might find interesting.
>
> In the late 1920s, a chap (call him "Smith" because I forgot his name)
> graduates from Oxford with a degree in linguistics. In time, he was
> conscripted by the British War Ministry and sent to code-breaking school. He
> then spent the war years involved in de-cyphering enemy messages. After the
> war, Smith went on to become a reader in Norse mythology and ancient
> languages at Cambridge.
>
> Shift gears
>
> In the early 1970s, a farmer in Minnesota dug up a small boulder with Runic
> inscriptions. He loaded it into his truck and carried it to a history
> teacher at the local community college. The instructor, had no idea, but
> took some Polaroids and sent them to a professor he knew at CCNY.
>
> Professor Brown (?) immediately mailed back: "Whatever you do, don't give
> Olaf Svenson any money! These are runes, but they don't make any sense.
> Somebody just copied random letters from an encyclopedia." When Svenson (or
> whatever his name was) was told, he took the rock back home and dumped it
> behind the barn and said "XXXX 'em all" (probably in Swedish).
>
> Time passes.
>
> In the early '80's, an annual convention of Norse scolars was held in New
> York (there are not a LOT of Norse scholars in the world). Professor Brown
> was the host, and invited a few (all? both?) of the attendees to his home
> for cocktails. Sufficiently lubricated, Brown pulls out his bullshit file
> and passes around the Polaroids from several years before.
>
> Smith looks. Click-click-click! IT'S IN CODE! A simple substitution code
> that translated into something like: "Here, on the 214th day of the voyage
> of Bundy the Long Knife, I, Faustine the Brave, claim all this land in the
> name of our king...."
>
> Serendipity. What are the chances of an English scholar trained in ancient
> Norse languages AND cryptography coming across a Runic surveyor's mark from
> Minnesota while visiting in New York?
>
> Anyway, Smith hies himself back to England and founds a new science:
> Archeological Cryptology, perhaps a sub-discipline of deciphering ancient
> texts (hieroglyphs, Minoan B, etc.).
>
> Also know the British Museum never throws anything away. Over the centuries,
> the museum has accumulated a lot of "junk" manuscripts, mainly from folks
> wanting money. Smith began studying these, and, sure enough, many were in
> code.
>
> (Aside: I may have a few details wrong: The names, the sequence, the dates,
> places, and times. The facts may be fuzzy, but the narrative is correct. I
> make no apologies; I suffer from Some-heimers)
>
> One of the more interesting decodings, to bring this all back to the
> discussion at hand, is a confusing verse in 2 Kings. Right in the middle of
> a geneology, there's a verse which says "Bananas are cheaper by the dozen,"
> or somesuch. Religious scholars, both Jewish and Christian, have, for two
> thousand years, tried to deduce the holy substance and divine message behind
> this puzzling verse. Turns out this verse, too, is a simple substitution
> code. It translates as "This King is a fink."
>
> Point is, discoveries are being made all the time, and not always from
> digging stuff up.
I wonder why a Norseman would encrypt a marker post? I can understand
why Leonardo Davinci would use mirror writing to obscure his texts but
a substitution cypher?
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