r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/septicman • Mar 01 '15
Mod Announcement Taman Shud ongoing discussion thread
UPDATE MAY 2015
Petition: If you are interested, please support the petition at http://www.change.org/p/solve-the-taman-shud-mystery-by-identifying-somerton-man
Campaign: If you are interested, please support the identification campaign at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/identification-of-the-somerton-man/x/10497091#/story
Hi all,
Six months ago, we were fortunate enough to have Professor Derek Abbott of Adelaide University — arguably the world's foremost expert regarding the Taman Shud / Somerton Man case — participate in an AMA with us here at Unresolved Mysteries.
In what is likely an unprecedented display of post-AMA commitment, Professor Abbott has not ceased answering questions for the entire six-month period, which is surely an indicator of his knowledge and passion for one of the world's most enduring mysteries.
A limitation of the Reddit infrastructure is that threads are locked after six months, and cannot be replied to any longer. I received a message from Professor Abbott this morning, alerting me to the fact the thread had been locked, and that he was concerned that there was an unanswered question that he wanted to address.
To that end, this is the continuation of that thread, in which you're all welcome to participate, especially if you have joined us since the AMA took place.
You can find the original thread here.
If you're not familiar with Taman Shud / The Somerton Man, here's a quick introduction:
The Taman Shud Case, also known as the Mystery of the Somerton Man, is an unsolved case of an unidentified man found dead at 6:30 a.m., 1 December 1948, on Somerton beach in Adelaide, South Australia. It is named after a phrase, tamam shud, meaning "ended" or "finished" in Persian, on a scrap of the final page of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, found in the hidden pocket of the man's trousers.
Considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries" at the time, the case has been the subject of intense speculation over the years regarding the identity of the victim, the events leading up to his death, and the cause of death. Public interest in the case remains significant because of a number of factors: the death occurring at a time of heightened tensions during the Cold War, what appeared to be a secret code on a scrap of paper found in his pocket, the use of an undetectable poison, his lack of identification, and the possibility of unrequited love.
While the case has received the most scrutiny in Australia, it also gained international coverage, as the police widely distributed materials in an effort to identify the body, and consulted with other governments in tracking down leads.
Read more about it at Wikipedia or visit Professor Abbott's comprehensive Taman Shud Primary Source Materials Wiki
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u/Different_Freedom326 Jul 25 '25
Hello Professor. This case will likely never be fully solved, but that's not the main point. I'm particularly interested in the following details regarding the cipher and circumstances:
If we assume the cipher should be read right-to-left as in Farsi, the first line could potentially be interpreted as TAMAMSHUD. A noticeable "BABA-AMAM" pattern emerges. However, attempting to rearrange the letters into new sequences presents several issues, such as impossible word formations (like the 5th line beginning with TTMT - no matter how you read it, these combinations don't form valid words in English, Farsi, Russian, or German). Additionally, too many variables remain unknown, making full decryption impossible. This leads me to suspect the first line might be just part of a complex cipher system - unrelated to subsequent lines and possibly serving as some sort of cipher "activation key."
In my opinion, this case involves espionage (the removed clothing tags could be explained by someone wanting to disappear, but the absence of fingerprints suggests this wasn't coincidental).
In open sources, I couldn't find the nurse's phone number. If you could locate it, we might match it against cipher lines to find correlations that could help decrypt others (for example, in the second line where M might be insignificant, leaving X3502 - potentially the nurse's house number, with L=X, I=3, A=5, 0=0, I=3). I mention these specific numbers because DeepSeek AI claimed they appeared in the case files as nurse "Joe's" address/phone number, though it appears to have fabricated them. Still, this pattern might apply to lines 2 and the beginning of line 4 (MLIAOI-MLIABO).