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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions "18-line Latin text" but I was unable to recognize any word on the scroll (took Latin in high school) even something obvious like deus.

Was this some sort of Latin shorthand?

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>> Although I realized fairly early on that the New Testament Letter to the Philippians is quoted at the end, I still spent a long time puzzling over the text, which is written in quite a crude form of Latin. I consulted specialist literature and databases and, finally, made some suggestions for how it might be interpreted.

>> The inscription begins with the Trisagion, the threefold cry of “Holy” [based on Isaiah 6:3], which remains part of the liturgy of the Eucharist to this day. In this case, however, it’s written in Greek [“agios, agios, agios”] but in Latin script.

https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/university-of-bonn-researche...

I can spot some of the shorthand. I see "Xp" a few times, which is actually imported from the Greek christos, abbreviated to chi-rho.

Also, each ΧΡ (Chi Rho) is preceded by another Christogram that sort of looks like IHS but I'm not sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christogram

Edit: Actually, here's the full transcription in Latin and German: https://archaeologisches-museum-frankfurt.de/index.php/de/?v...

Some of the letter shapes look like Latin/Roman cursive, but even then I'm not sure I recognize any words either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

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