Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
These encrypted inscriptions are found in Venice in the sotoportego↓ de la Madonna, adjacent to the Calle del Perdon opposite the church of Sant'Aponal. In July 2022 the existence of this unresolved cipher was presented by Klaus Schmeh in his blog (see link at bottom) based on a report that it presented only one inscription, noting that it used pigpen cipher marks, but trying the classic pigpen of the Freemasons, yielded nothing sensible.
. Knowing the manuscript treatise on digits by Agostino Amadi, kept in the State Archives in Venice, and remembering that it also presented a pigpen-type digit of only 18 letters (see the page describing it in detail), I thought that might be the digit used; but trying it out came up CASL? VADESAT where the ? refers to the corner symbol in the fifth position,absent in the Amadi numeral; it sounded good because the consonant-vowel alternation was correct, and it gave the idea of Latin, but it had no meaning. And there was a feeling that the letters at the beginning of the alphabet A D E, maybe even L, were correct and that there was a slippage of letters at the end of the alphabet.
. It occurred to me that it could be a 22-letter digit extension as in Bellaso's and with corner marks for the last letters as in the Freemasons' pigpen; recovering the absent H in the Amadi digit, then moving the rest of the alphabet forward and bringing the last 4, V X Y Z into the corners, yielded a CARLVTADERAS, which sounded good but my Latin, rusty from high school days, struggled to recognize the parts, CARL VT AD ERAS? It was Norbert Biermann, on Schmeh's blog, who suggested it might be CARLVS ADERAT, Latin for "Charles was here," assuming there had been an oversight between S and T.
All I had to do was to go to the site in calle del Perdon and take many photos. There were many plaintext inscriptions related to the Templars, and some ciphered using the pigpen signs, whiche, when deciphered, fully confirmed the 22-letter pigpen hypothesis, visible here on the side, by deciphering in Italian. In these inscriptions, the S and T were written according to the 22-letter cipher on the side here.
. There are a total of five cipher inscriptions, visible here to the side (those on the SE beam, by clicking on the yellow button), one in Latin, the other two in Italian and in duplicate, one on the NO beam and one on the opposite beam. The deciphered texts are rather strange, statements of faith such as "God exists," "God is eternal," along with the news that a certain "Carlo Zandinella" has died. The plaintext inscriptions echo Templar mottos such as the famous, "NON NOBIS DOMINE, NON NOBIS," along with the red-colored cross; interestingly, the inscription in Roman numerals below 3b, shows a year 1119 shortly after the birth of the order and two dates 13 10 1307, the date of the arrest of the last Templar masters by order of King Philip IV the Fair of France, and 18 03 1314 the date of the burning of its last grand master Jacques De Molay. Other inscriptions curiously replicate CARLVS ADERAT in plain text definitively confirming the correctness of the solution. It was only on a later site visit that I noticed that in the upper left-hand corner on the north beam was a tablet that under CARLVS ADERAT bore MMVIII, 2008 in Roman numerals! If as seems obvious CARLVS is the Charles Zandinella of inscription No. 3, it translates to "Charles was here, 2008." Signature and date?
There are a total of five ciphered inscriptions, visible here on the side (the ones on the second beam by clicking on the yellow button), one in Latin, the other two in Italian and in duplicate, one on the beam facing northwest and one on the opposite beam. The deciphered texts are rather strange, statements of faith such as "God exists," "God is eternal," along with the news that a certain "Carlo Zandinella" has died. The plaintext inscriptions echo Templar mottos such as the famous, "NON NOBIS DOMINE, NON NOBIS," along with the red-colored cross. The inscription in Roman numerals below 3b is interesting; it bears a year 1119 shortly after the order's birth and two dates 13 10 1307, the date of the arrest of the last Templar masters by order of King Philip IV the Fair of France, and 18 03 1314 the date of the burning of its last grand master Jacques De Molay. Other inscriptions curiously replicate CARLVS ADERAT in plain text, definitively confirming the correctness of the solution. Open questions While cryptographically the issue is resolved, the context is puzzling and several questions remain: 1) When did the inscriptions date back? 2) When were they attached to the beams? 3) Who wrote them? 4) What do these cipher inscriptions have to do with the other plaintext inscriptions that are all in Templar memory? 5) Why write in cipher things that do not seem to conceal anything secret? 6) Who was this Carlo Zandinella? 7) Had anyone decrypted them in recent times? . Even before discovering the inscription with 2008, many elements suggested that the whole thing was very recent: the use of Phillips-head screws that had been in use for half a century or so; the wood that did not appear ancient; and the engravings that appeared to be made with an electric drill[↑]. . Based on the elements that have emerged so far, one can venture these answers: 1) The inscriptions are very recent, after 2008; 2) As above; 3) alternatively: either Carlo Zandinella is the one who set up the whole thing, and an obituary was written in cipher at the end, in mockery or otherwise, or, more likely, a friend or relative of Carlo Zandinella set it up. Or what else? 4) The conjecture that the pigpen was invented by the Templars; 5) Either to hide Charles Z.'s name or to recall the alleged relationship between Templars and pigpen; 6) A Venetian interested in the Templars, it would seem; 7) Impossible to answer. The origins of the pigpen The pigpen digit is a very weak digit, certainly not in professional use, but it is one of the best known. Known as the cipher of the Freemasons, who used it in the 18th and 19th centuries, the origins seem to be much more remote, one reads of Jewish origins or from the time of the Crusades and in particular, as it happens, of the Templars. In this regard, the French-speaking Swiss cryptologist Didier Müller on pages 106-107 of his book, after the pigpen, presents his own reconstruction of a cipher used by the Templars, similar to the pigpen; but the reconstruction is a conjecture of Müller's, which does not convince at all, moreover he uses a modern alphabet of 25 letters, many more than the 18 of the Brocardo/Amadi and more than the 20 letters of the Old Latin alphabet, which in the 12th-13th centuries was still the one in use; and the Templars being a monastic order had to write in classical Latin. Verisimilarly Müller relied on a recent transcription of a medieval text. Of substance there is only some similarity between the Templar star and the pigpen scheme. Conclusions These hidden inscriptions in a Venetian sotoportego, written with an alphabet in use until the 16th-17th century, and with a cipher described by Amadi in the 16th century, might have appeared ancient and induced the hope of having found some evidence on the origins of the pigpen. Not so, on the contrary, the author of these inscriptions used a 16th century version of the pigpen in the belief that it was a cipher invented by the Templars; in fact, given that the other inscriptions, those in plain text, are all in Templar memory, it is likely that those in cipher are as well. In short, it is a hoax, a forgery, in the sense that they are recent inscriptions that would like to appear ancient. Whether it is a forgery made for mockery or to commemorate the Templars or for who knows what other reason, it is a forgery artfully made by someone, a paleographer?, who knew these alphabets and ciphers, knowledge that is certainly not widespread. After all, there is also an art of forgery and a whole history of forgeries even in cryptography. Acknowledgements To Klaus Schmeh who pointed me to the existence of these cipher writings, to which he has devoted several posts on his blog (see link below), and to Norbert Biermann and other blog readers for the contribution mentioned above. Bibliography Agostino Amadi, Trattato delle ziffre, Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Venezia, 1588 − 1588, pag. 8 → eBook David Kahn, The codebreakers, Scribner, New York, 1967 − 1996, “Heterogenous Impulses”, pag. 772 → eBook Didier Müller, Les Codes Secrets Décryptés, City, Saint-Victor-d'Épine, 2011, “Pigpen - l'Alphabet de Templiers”, pag. 106 → eBook Web links Cipherbrain Blog di Klaus Schmeh dedicato soprattutto a scritture cifrate non risolte.: Eine ungelöste Pigpen-Chiffre aus Venedig Cipherbrain Blog di Klaus Schmeh dedicato soprattutto a scritture cifrate non risolte.: Die Pigpen Inschriften von Venedig Cipherbrain Blog di Klaus Schmeh dedicato soprattutto a scritture cifrate non risolte.: An unsolved pigpen cipher from Venice Cipherbrain Blog di Klaus Schmeh dedicato soprattutto a scritture cifrate non risolte.: The Pigpen Inscriptions of Venice @2022 La Crittografia da Atbash a RSA Scrivi al webmaster X The remark was made by Holger Gruber, Stuttgart, on Klaus Schmeh's blog, who argues that those engravings were made with a rotary tool, like an electric drill, and therefore cannot be older than 50-60 years. X Identical inscription on the opposite beam, curiously vertically. X Identical inscription on the opposite beam. X Sotoportego in the Venetian idiom is an open passage under a building.
There are a total of five ciphered inscriptions, visible here on the side (the ones on the second beam by clicking on the yellow button), one in Latin, the other two in Italian and in duplicate, one on the beam facing northwest and one on the opposite beam. The deciphered texts are rather strange, statements of faith such as "God exists," "God is eternal," along with the news that a certain "Carlo Zandinella" has died. The plaintext inscriptions echo Templar mottos such as the famous, "NON NOBIS DOMINE, NON NOBIS," along with the red-colored cross. The inscription in Roman numerals below 3b is interesting; it bears a year 1119 shortly after the order's birth and two dates 13 10 1307, the date of the arrest of the last Templar masters by order of King Philip IV the Fair of France, and 18 03 1314 the date of the burning of its last grand master Jacques De Molay. Other inscriptions curiously replicate CARLVS ADERAT in plain text, definitively confirming the correctness of the solution.
While cryptographically the issue is resolved, the context is puzzling and several questions remain: 1) When did the inscriptions date back? 2) When were they attached to the beams? 3) Who wrote them? 4) What do these cipher inscriptions have to do with the other plaintext inscriptions that are all in Templar memory? 5) Why write in cipher things that do not seem to conceal anything secret? 6) Who was this Carlo Zandinella? 7) Had anyone decrypted them in recent times?
. Even before discovering the inscription with 2008, many elements suggested that the whole thing was very recent: the use of Phillips-head screws that had been in use for half a century or so; the wood that did not appear ancient; and the engravings that appeared to be made with an electric drill[↑].
. Based on the elements that have emerged so far, one can venture these answers: 1) The inscriptions are very recent, after 2008; 2) As above; 3) alternatively: either Carlo Zandinella is the one who set up the whole thing, and an obituary was written in cipher at the end, in mockery or otherwise, or, more likely, a friend or relative of Carlo Zandinella set it up. Or what else? 4) The conjecture that the pigpen was invented by the Templars; 5) Either to hide Charles Z.'s name or to recall the alleged relationship between Templars and pigpen; 6) A Venetian interested in the Templars, it would seem; 7) Impossible to answer.
The pigpen digit is a very weak digit, certainly not in professional use, but it is one of the best known. Known as the cipher of the Freemasons, who used it in the 18th and 19th centuries, the origins seem to be much more remote, one reads of Jewish origins or from the time of the Crusades and in particular, as it happens, of the Templars. In this regard, the French-speaking Swiss cryptologist Didier Müller on pages 106-107 of his book, after the pigpen, presents his own reconstruction of a cipher used by the Templars, similar to the pigpen; but the reconstruction is a conjecture of Müller's, which does not convince at all, moreover he uses a modern alphabet of 25 letters, many more than the 18 of the Brocardo/Amadi and more than the 20 letters of the Old Latin alphabet, which in the 12th-13th centuries was still the one in use; and the Templars being a monastic order had to write in classical Latin. Verisimilarly Müller relied on a recent transcription of a medieval text. Of substance there is only some similarity between the Templar star and the pigpen scheme.
These hidden inscriptions in a Venetian sotoportego, written with an alphabet in use until the 16th-17th century, and with a cipher described by Amadi in the 16th century, might have appeared ancient and induced the hope of having found some evidence on the origins of the pigpen. Not so, on the contrary, the author of these inscriptions used a 16th century version of the pigpen in the belief that it was a cipher invented by the Templars; in fact, given that the other inscriptions, those in plain text, are all in Templar memory, it is likely that those in cipher are as well.
In short, it is a hoax, a forgery, in the sense that they are recent inscriptions that would like to appear ancient. Whether it is a forgery made for mockery or to commemorate the Templars or for who knows what other reason, it is a forgery artfully made by someone, a paleographer?, who knew these alphabets and ciphers, knowledge that is certainly not widespread. After all, there is also an art of forgery and a whole history of forgeries even in cryptography.
To Klaus Schmeh who pointed me to the existence of these cipher writings, to which he has devoted several posts on his blog (see link below), and to Norbert Biermann and other blog readers for the contribution mentioned above.