What on earth is this

[David Boulding]

My grandfather was in India, Mespotamia and Persia during WWI so I must presume this was his. What it says - and even which way up it's meant to be - I have no idea. Anyone any ideas?

[Gadget]

I've no idea what it is but, to me, it looks upside down.

?? Sanskrit??

Add - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanskrit.jpg

[David Boulding]

Ha ha! I tried both ways up and I know these Orientals write from right to left... So I am none the wiser.

[Gadget]

It was the position on the page that made  me think of it that way.

I've added a link to the Sanskrit alphabet on my earlier post!

[Stanwix England]

My first instinct was that it looks like Hebrew. There is a reasonable image of it at the link below.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-beginnings-of-the-hebrew-language/

[Stanwix England]

If you look at the last bit, which may be a signature or sign off at the bottom, I think it looks a lot like this, which I have attached.

I made some tentative progress 'translating' each letter using this.

https://stevemorse.org/hebrew/trans.html?mode=hebrew

So what looks to me like the first two letters of the signature/sign off, if we are reading it from left to right, seemed to say 'to go up' or 'to ascend'.

I could be clasping at straws here of course.

[David Boulding]

A good effort. Certainly I think I'll go with the Hebrew suggestion. That attempted translation - certainly of the first two characters - look very similar indeed (going right to left).

My grandfather also looked after a camp of displaced Assyrians 1918-1920 (in Persia I think)

[arthurk]

Yes, it's Hebrew, and the first part appears to be Deuteronomy 6:4 and onwards - see https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0506.htm (note that printed texts like this often don't show all the dots etc that are in the web page)

I haven't read right through it and compared it to see how far it goes, but after a bit I was struggling to spot the similarities so it's possible it switches to something else.

[David Boulding]

Well done that man! For years I wondered how I could find out what this was.

Very many thanks to those who helped in my quest.

"Now this is the commandment, the statutes, and the ordinances, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it-- "

My grandfather would have known his bible and this  snippet seems very apt.