12 Cryptic Inscriptions to See Around the World - Atlas Obscura Lists
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12 Cryptic Inscriptions to See Around the World

What does it all mean?

by allegrarosenberg
12 Places

Words carved into stone can cement your legacy, persisting through time and generations. Of course, there’s always a risk that people reading your words won’t understand what you meant by them, who you are, or why you carved words into stone in the first place. But that will just make them more interesting. 

Cryptic inscriptions can be found on gravestones, cave walls, rocks, or buildings; they might be relatively recent or definitively ancient. Either way, they tend to attract attention: nobody can resist a good mystery. A Utah gravestone declaring a woman to have been a “Victim of the Beast” has been shocking passersby since the 1950s (although the real story may well be more sad than scary). A cryptic carved stone discovered in 1930s Virginia may be a hoax, or it may hold the secret to the fate of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. A salvaged stone with an undeciphered inscription dating back millennia is one of the Eleven National Treasures of Singapore. 

There’s no rush on divining the meaning of these mysterious messages, though. Doing so might take away all the fun and fascination.  

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