Dacia inscription deciphered

[Imperial Dave]

https://arkeonews.net/mysterious-inscription-on-ancient-dacia-sphinx-is-deciphered/

Nothing to do with cars...

[Nick Harbud]

and I could have sworn it said "Eat at Luigi's"

[Imperial Dave]

It does 

[Ian61]

So Peter Revesz decides to reverse the letters. I wonder if he does it a lot? There is definitely a whiff of nominative determinism there.

Hiding things by doing them backwards clearly predates Led Zeppelin vinyl.

[Denis Grey]

So Peter Revesz decides to reverse the letters. I wonder if he does it a lot? There is definitely a whiff of nominative determinism there.

Hiding things by doing them backwards clearly predates Led Zeppelin vinyl.

Samuel Pepys beat them to it by at least three centuries.

[Jon Freitag]

I wonder if the surviving drawing is actually sketched as a mirror image of the original.

[Swampster]

I'm surprised that it is identified as 'Proto-Hungarian'. That doesn't seem to tally with a third century date.

[DBS]

I'm surprised that it is identified as 'Proto-Hungarian'. That doesn't seem to tally with a third century date.

That was what immediately struck me.  If one reads his academic article at https://www.maajournal.com/index.php/maa/article/view/1209/1035
the explanation is a theory that the Magyars can possibly be identified as being in Ptolemy's Geography somewhere in the Volga region, and possible mention by Ovid of some near the lower Danube.  Also, the bit lost in the summary writeup is the use of the sphinx as a motif by Scythians at Pazyryk. 

Whilst on its own I would be sympathetic to the Ptolemy argument, but fear that the Ovid argument was stretching the linguistics, I do suppose that if his translation stands up, then it perhaps clinches the argument that some (he is suggesting only outliers) of proto-Magyars might have drifted that far west by the third century and have assimilated into the empire.  The fact that he thinks the actual missing sphinx bronze may have Greek Black Sea provenance also makes sense with that direction of travel.

The idea that Greek letters might be used as the alphabet is not odd; he might easily have pointed to the use of the Greek alphabet post-Alexander to inscribe other languages by the Bactrians and Kushans.

[Duncan Head]

I'm surprised that it is identified as 'Proto-Hungarian'.

Since the author has a Hungarian surname, and having in mind some of the dafter theories on Hungarian protohistory, I was sadly not surprised.