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From Daily Telegraph:
Can you solve a Victorian puzzle promising 'Earthly Paradise'?
A museum is calling on people to solve a cryptic 150-year-old
message which could hold the key to an Earthly Paradise.
Can you solve a Victorian puzzle promising 'Earthly Paradise'?
A museum is calling on people to solve a cryptic 150-year-old
message which could hold the key to an Earthly Paradise.
more, with the puzzle itself and the bits the museum staff have figured out at the link aboveThe historic poster, thought to date from the 1860s, spells out the prize for a lottery in the form of a pictogram.
But baffled museum curators cannot work out quite what the lottery is offering players.
The poster is being displayed for the first time as part of an exhibition on the history of games and gambling at Abbey House Museum in Kirkstall in Leeds.
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Pictograms were a popular game in Victorian times and even before. Jane Austen heroines would write pictograms to one another in their letters.
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But curators have not managed to decipher the full meaning of the advert. Kitty Ross, curator of social history at the museum, is asking the public to help.
There are lots of bits of it that have been puzzling people, she said.
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"For example there is a globe and two dice. We puzzled for ages on that one, thinking it could be anything. Then we suddenly realised it was paradise [pair of dice]. So it's quite corny, full of wordplay and puns."
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