Archaeologists in Jerusalem have found a 2,000-year-old stone cup. The leader of the excavation team Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina says this kind of cup was common in Jewish households of the time, but this particular cup is different.
The inscription will eventually be posted online. Link
(image credit: S. Pfann/UHL)
What sets the newfound cup apart is its inscription, which is still sharply etched but so far impossible to understand.Similar to intentionally enigmatic writing in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the cup's script appears to be a secret code, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the two written languages used in Jerusalem at the time (see video of a village where the language of Jesus is still spoken).
"They wrote it intending it to be cryptic," Gibson said.
The inscription will eventually be posted online. Link
(image credit: S. Pfann/UHL)
When it pertains to Biblical Archaeology, and you're taking about people during that time that were master craftsman, this vessel doesn't fly. It looks like some kid took a knife and carved some cheap wood.
It's sloppy really. I want documented proof!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hebrew_alphabet#Ancestral_scripts_and_script_variants
The old "aleph-bet" was not commonly known but would have been recognized by the well-educated religious scholars or priests of the time. Use of those letters connoted something similar to the use of gothic script in bibles today ... it's an evocation of the authority of tradition, and would have had the additional advantage of obscuring the meaning somewhat from casual eyes. So I wouldn't call it a code, exactly, but more of a filter.
This sort of layered complexity was typical of sects such as the Essenes. In the Dead Sea scrolls they wrote the tetragrammaton YHVH in the old script.