Nimcha markings

[Philip]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

As you mention, Caino was well known for lines of seemingly nonsensical letters, sometimes in curious repetition.
It is believed that this was a European convention of acrostics representing certain phases or invocations which had particular esoteric meanings.
These evolved in degree from combinations of varied religious applications including kabbalistic and often entwined with magic, occult and other connected symbolism including Masonic.

The interpolation of numbers and letters sometimes is involved as well, as letters may have numerical value, and vice versa, depending on the case at hand.

With such esoterica, even literate workers in Europe had difficulty duplicating these intricate systems of arcane lettering accurately if not properly initiated, let alone workers in other cultures trying to approximate them.

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In a European context, this tradition is explained very well by Oakeshott in Ch 12 of his masterful The Archaeology of Weapons which I am sure you have in your library. For the benefit of forumites who do not, here is an example he cites from a medieval Frankish blade:

SOSMENCRSOS with the N and R run together back to back and the
C intertwined into that combo and the Os enclose the
adjacent Ss.
He analyzes it as an acronym for a religious phrase, O Sancta Maria, Eripe me [rescue me] O CRiste Sancte... Keep in mind that in Latin, word order is flexible so transposition of letters in the acronym would not necessarily result in loss of meaning.

In a non-Christian context, there is a strong tradition of assigning numerical values to letters in the Hebraic tradition, in a codifying system that was also borrowed by peoples using Arabic script. Hence, "786" was a convenient numerical expression for the phrase Bismillah al-Rahmân al Rahîm which introduces each book in the Koran. These developments should be looked at in the light of the fact that in classical Mediterranean civilizations, numerals were represented by letters-- not only the Romans, but the Greeks and Israelites did so as well. A dedicated set of symbols, using zero as a place-holder in decimal numeration, originated in India and is the root of our "Arabic" numerals. An immeasurable gift to the world of mathematics, it made developments like algebra, calculus, etc etc possible. Imagine doing your tax return using Roman numerals and you'll see why,