What is believed to be the oldest example of written English in a British church has been found in Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire. Can you decode it? Post your thoughts here.

It was hidden for 350 years behind a monument to a local aristocrat who was ‘martyred’ in the English Civil War for his support of King Charles I but rediscovered in January by astonished conservators.

And baffled experts have resorted to asking members of the public with a keen eye for deciphering puzzles to have a look at the text, and a computer-enhanced version, to see if they can help out.

Tim Tatton Brown, the cathedral’s consultant archaeologist, explained: “The Cathedral’s conservators quite unexpectedly found some beautifully written English text behind the Henry Hyde Monument on the cathedral’s south aisle wall when the monument was temporarily removed as part of the on-going schedule of work.

“I had originally surmised the text date from the 16th century, bearing in mind that the monument was erected soon after 1660. However, our researchers now suggest it was written a century earlier and therefore pre-dates the Reformation.

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To those who believe William Shakespeare did author his plays, Fulke Greville has always been a top choice for who truly did. It was rumoured that all the original manuscripts were buried with him. Now an endoscope will be used to probe the tomb and determine if this is true. Exciting!

A prominent 17th-century nobleman, Greville was a renowned scholar, soldier, statesman and spy.

Like his dearest friend Sir Philip Sidney, he was also an accomplished author.

So talented, indeed, that some believe he was the true author of several of Shakespeare’s works.

For years this has been little more than conjecture; fuel for the lively and often hostile debate between Anti-Stratfordians – those who deny that an ill- educated grain merchant and actor such as William Shakespeare could possibly have produced such a stunning oeuvre – and outraged traditionalists.

Now, however, the tantalising prospect of a definitive answer has been raised. More intriguingly still, the explanation, hidden in a series of clues scattered throughout his work and on the Warwick monument, is said to come from Fulke Greville himself.

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A 3,000 year-old inscription of proto-Canaanite script is the earliest known Hebrew writing.

A 3,000 year-old inscription discovered at a site where the Bible says David slew Goliath has been deciphered, showing it to be the earliest known Hebrew writing, Israeli archaeologists said on Thursday.

The pottery shard with five lines of text in the proto-Canaanite script that was used by Hebrews, Philistines and others in the region was discovered 18 months ago.

The writing was decrypted by Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa who “has shown this is a Hebrew inscription,” said a statement from the university.

“The discovery makes it the earliest known Hebrew writing,” the statement said.

Carbon-dating has shown the inscription dates back to the 10th century BC, making it about 1,000-years older than the Dead Sea scrolls.

“This text is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans,” said Galil, adding that both the words and the concepts used were specific to the Hebrew language and society.

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Clay cuneiform tablets from the Assyrian empire have been decoded, shedding light on what life was like 3,000 years ago in the area.

Palace scribes jotted down seemingly mundane state affairs on the tablets during the Late Iron Age—which lasted from roughly the end of the ninth century B.C. until the mid-seventh century B.C.

But these everyday details, now in the early stages of decoding, may open up some of the inner workings of the Assyrian government—and the people who toiled in the empire, experts say.

“You’re really getting at the nitty gritty of the management of the empire through these kind of records,” said Melinda Zeder, director of the archaeobiology program at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research.

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Charles Dickens’ heavily marked up original manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” has gone on display, shedding light on the master’s writing process.

It is an enduring mystery of English literature: What secrets lie entombed beneath the thick scribbles that Charles Dickens made as he wrote, and rewrote, the 66 pages of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843?

The manuscript of this classic holiday ghost story, written in six weeks to raise much-needed cash, is housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, where it bears all of Dickens’s additions and subtractions in his own hand.

On page 3, he inserts “his eyes sparkled” to amplify the portrait of Scrooge’s nephew, whose beneficence is crucial to the plot.

On page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion, (“more of gravy than of grave,”) he converts the offending bit of food from being a “spot of mustard” to a less digestible “blot of mustard.”

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