Fifty Lines Nobody Could Read: The Singapore Stone

2026-08-26 · True Mysteries Editorial Desk · Unsolved Ciphers · 7 min read

The labourers hacking through the undergrowth at the mouth of the Singapore River in June 1819 had been hired to clear ground, not to make discoveries. Sir Stamford Raffles had come ashore only months earlier, and the East India Company was busy turning a sparsely settled island into a port. Somewhere on the promontory the British would come to call Rocky Point, the clearing party reached a sandstone slab standing above the water, roughly three metres high and almost as wide, split down the middle into two leaning halves.

One face of it was covered in writing.

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