Episode 1
Code on the grave of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is buried in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England. There is no name on the stone.
On his grave it says:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare
To digg the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones
This stone isnt the original one that was put on his grave, as it was replaced in the 1820s, but they had the same text, with one difference.. on the
original one the letters were a mix of small and capital letters.
Now why would anyone make it like that?
"cloAsed"
"HE.Re"
Coincidently, at the time he lived, a code system was beeing made that used big and small letters, called biliteral cipher... contructed by scientist
and philosopher
Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon's celebrated biliteral cipher (1605) was an arrangement of the letters a and b in five-letter combinations, each representing a
letter of the alphabet. This code illustrates the important principle that a code employing only two different signs can be used to transmit
information.
But noone has manage to prove that the code can be used to decipher the gravestone, so they havent found any potential secret messages.
This is what you get when using the code on the grave
(big letters are B, small A)
The first word "GooD" becomes BAAAB, and if you use the code on the entire text, you will get this:
The code teaches that BAAAB equals the letter S. If you look at all the letters you end up with these:
Are these random letters, or can we find stuff in it? Well this is where it gets interesting.
In here you find interesting letters clustered. Keep in mind we are just looking for stuff, not makin any conclusions. So look at this:
It seems to spell Shaxspheare. And down in the middle is also a W. Lets keep those for now. (Shakespeare was written with x sometimes)
We can find the first letters of the maker of this code also, Francis Bacon, FR BA
On the gravestone it said:
"To dig the dust enclosed here" Amundsen saw a similarity between the letters DUST on the grave and the letters YETA. They were both enclosed. The
dust of Shakespear is indeed enclosed in his own tomb, and the words YETA is enclosed by the surrounding letters.
He thought that maybe, just maybe DUST is the key.. so what if he needed to somehow combine the two.
He used an accepted code he says, where he combines the value of letters based on where they are in the alphabet (a=1, b=2 etc) and finds another:
Didnt go into detail, so i dont know how he got what numbers. He explained that:
YETA
+
DUST
=
CANV
replace the letters YETA with CANV, and you might just see something.
FR BACAN V. See it?
It is Francis Bacon Verulam, (Verulam beeing the title he used all the time)
Amundsen then realized it doesnt matter how it is spelled, this is a phonetic system, you cant realy hear the difference if someone says
bacon with o
or
bacan with a
But there are still unused letters remaining on the code.
Read more in my next post...
[edit on 20/12/2009 by Daniem]
edit on 5/4/11 by argentus because: repaired broken coding