This stamp was sent in by a visitor to Omniglot who would like to know whether anybody identify and decipher the writing on it.
7 thoughts on “Puzzle”
It’s really hard to make out the characters, but it looks like Georgian alphabet to me. I suspect it’s part of the Bible passage quoted below (John 8:12). According to the Unbound Bible, the Georgian version is:
მერმეცა ეტყოდავე იესუ და ჰრქუა მათ: მე ვარ ნათელი სოფლისაჲ. რომელი შემომიდგეს მე, არა ვიდოდის ბნელსა, არამედ აქუნდეს ნათელი ცხორებისაჲ.
However, the quoted words are probably “მე ვარ ნათელი სოფლისაჲ” and I can’t see a match there.
It could be another verse. Or I could be completely wrong.
I thought I recognised the portrait from occult books. It’s a portrait of the Comte “Saint Germain”, who is allegedly immortal and by now several thousand years old. (Look him up in Wikipedia for more info.) The portrait was done for the I Am foundation in the 30s (I lost the specific date) by the American artist Charles Sindelar: it pops up in full colour and much better quality within the first couple of pages of any Google image search for “Saint Germain”. I suspect the letters in the background are from a magic/occult alphabet. They have some resemblance to the Theban Alphabet:
Something weird here. The writing under the portrait is English, yet the symbols in the corners and above the portrait are…?
It is quite unclear, but yes, I guess from some hard edges of the letters, it is Georgian (rather than Armenian which is more curvatic I presume).
My first thought was that this was the old Indic Sindhi script, the one used before it was replaced by Arabic and Devanagari. Realising this was the Saint Germain portrait Makes the question a bit more complicated. The answer could probably be found by looking into the history of how the portrait was made for the I Am organisation, or perhaps even by getting hold of a Saint Germain or Ascended Masters book: I imagine there might be sone explanation somewhere, whether in a caption or in the text itself.
Yes, I sorta see it now. By level of the nose, to the left, there is one character that looks like “C” or “L” in Theban.
Anyway, seems it is not much related to … “linguistic” endeavour let’s say?
The writing seems to be in the Avestan alphabet of old Persian. Zoroastrian references and imagery on the stamp seem to confirm this.
I was leaning toward Avestan as a possibility too, but I hesitate about it because it has no downward-open arches like in the ‘m’-like letter in the top line, and I don’t see any good matches for a lot of the characters in this picture. I’ll have to see if a glance at one of the Saint Germain-related books floating around might give some clue…
It’s really hard to make out the characters, but it looks like Georgian alphabet to me. I suspect it’s part of the Bible passage quoted below (John 8:12). According to the Unbound Bible, the Georgian version is:
მერმეცა ეტყოდავე იესუ და ჰრქუა მათ: მე ვარ ნათელი სოფლისაჲ. რომელი შემომიდგეს მე, არა ვიდოდის ბნელსა, არამედ აქუნდეს ნათელი ცხორებისაჲ.
However, the quoted words are probably “მე ვარ ნათელი სოფლისაჲ” and I can’t see a match there.
It could be another verse. Or I could be completely wrong.
I thought I recognised the portrait from occult books. It’s a portrait of the Comte “Saint Germain”, who is allegedly immortal and by now several thousand years old. (Look him up in Wikipedia for more info.) The portrait was done for the I Am foundation in the 30s (I lost the specific date) by the American artist Charles Sindelar: it pops up in full colour and much better quality within the first couple of pages of any Google image search for “Saint Germain”. I suspect the letters in the background are from a magic/occult alphabet. They have some resemblance to the Theban Alphabet:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/theban.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet
Something weird here. The writing under the portrait is English, yet the symbols in the corners and above the portrait are…?
It is quite unclear, but yes, I guess from some hard edges of the letters, it is Georgian (rather than Armenian which is more curvatic I presume).
My first thought was that this was the old Indic Sindhi script, the one used before it was replaced by Arabic and Devanagari. Realising this was the Saint Germain portrait Makes the question a bit more complicated. The answer could probably be found by looking into the history of how the portrait was made for the I Am organisation, or perhaps even by getting hold of a Saint Germain or Ascended Masters book: I imagine there might be sone explanation somewhere, whether in a caption or in the text itself.
Yes, I sorta see it now. By level of the nose, to the left, there is one character that looks like “C” or “L” in Theban.
Anyway, seems it is not much related to … “linguistic” endeavour let’s say?
The writing seems to be in the Avestan alphabet of old Persian. Zoroastrian references and imagery on the stamp seem to confirm this.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/avestan.htm
I was leaning toward Avestan as a possibility too, but I hesitate about it because it has no downward-open arches like in the ‘m’-like letter in the top line, and I don’t see any good matches for a lot of the characters in this picture. I’ll have to see if a glance at one of the Saint Germain-related books floating around might give some clue…