Very much Puzzled

[Gerryatrics]

I've been doing a lot of online puzzles, riddles and competitions of the same lately. I noticed quite a few people helped out on a cryptogram someone posted a while back, and a lot of people tried their hand at a sort of acronym puzzle thing someone else posted. So I figured I'd try posting a puzzle that's had me stumped to see if anyone had any ideas on how to tackle it. I've looked at a lot of Ancient alphabets and runes, and while a few of the characters in the picture are shared by some of the various alphabets, I haven't yet found one that contains all of the characters.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b84/DCTORN/theatre_of_history.jpg

I'm also working on a tricky list of questions that seem to revolve mostly around Greek/Roman mythology and/or history, so if you're a buff of... all that and you want to take a stab at some of them, let me know and I can PM you the list.

[PakiDan]

It says:

"Drink your Ovaltine."

[Vizzini]

It says:

"Drink your Ovaltine."



Ovaltine? Huh, it must be Italian.

[Gerryatrics]

Nobody? Not even any of our scholars from the Political board? And there have to be some Greek/Roman mythology/history buffs here.

[phyzik]

It looks almost like Glagolitic, I'll keep looking.

this is an actual puzzle right? could the letters be upside down or rotated at a 90 degree angle?

[exstatic]

Count the distinct characters, and you will have an idea if it may be a substitution of glyphs for letters of an alphabet. There may also be punctuation symbols.

[Gerryatrics]

It is an actual puzzle. You can view it in it's original context here if you'd like. The first thing I tried was substituting Latin letters for characters so I could run it through a cryptogram solver, but shortly after starting the second line I realized there were more characters than there are letters in the Latin alphabet. There might be spaces, punctuation and numbers in there, in which case I'm screwed. Most of the symbols can be found in actual historic alphabets, so I don't think rotating it is the way to go. Hopefully I don't have to go through character by character, figure out which alphabet it belongs to and transliterate it to the Latin alphabet.

[Gerryatrics]

Only a couple of days left to find the answer, anyone come up with anything? I still have no clue. The puzzle is called "Theatre of History" if that gives anyone any ideas. If you have any friends who are experts in ancient languages, now is the time to have them take a look.

I at least did better than I thought I would in the Classical Mythology/Ancient History/some other random stuff challenge. Here are the questions (answers?) if anyone wants to give it a try themselves.

1. Inventor of nephelokokkygia.
2. Hatched a plot against her husband.
3. Wise Greek judged not to be the fairest.
4. This composite beast, wild and inhospitable, after a snatch job, died on an arrow poisoned with snake venom.
5. Emperor whose literary informer was rocked by Mozart?
6. This wily character's home was rocky and sea-girt (Latin version).
7. X it, you might remark "alea iacta est".
8. Latin city.
9. He inflicted the penultimate wound on the Nereids' finest son's best mate.
10. Nosey poet.
11. A great first wife?
12. Let down by hot wax.
13. To elude him, pacify his mother?
14. Member of family Corvus getting direction. He did get his vengeance! (Cognomen).
15. First appeared in Athenian naval lists in 325/4 BC.
16. During this pivotal battle, one force was afflicted with malaria and the winner took the title Princeps.
17. Sum?

I believe I got 12 of them correct.

[jman3000]

i like this kinda stuff... but it's too late to try anything with it now.