A new attack on the mysterious inscription of Santa Maria La Nova

Abstract

Expanding upon the established hypothesis of monoalphabetic substitution with potential transposition and polyalphabetic elements, this analysis of the Santa Maria la Nova epigraph incorporates Ancient Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Old Romanian and Old Albanian, thus exploring the possibility that the cipher’s plaintext derives from historically under-examined languages, particularly those with cultural and historical ties to medieval Naples and its Eastern Mediterranean networks. Special attention is given to aligning the analyzed corpora with the epigraph's actual textual rendering and to the evaluation of multilingualism.