The Unidentified Man and the Poet’s Final Words

On the morning of December 1, 1948, a man’s body was discovered slumped against the seawall of Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. He was impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, his shoes polished, his hair neat. There were no signs of a struggle, no identification, and even the labels on his clothing had been meticulously removed. He was a ghost, a man without a past. For months, the case remained stagnant until investigators discovered a tiny, hidden fob pocket sewn into the man’s trousers. Tucked inside was a tightly rolled scrap of paper printed with two words: “Tamám Shud.”

This cryptic phrase was the first real clue in a case that would spiral into a web of international intrigue, secret codes, and enduring mystery. For linguists and cryptographers, the Somerton Man case is a tantalizing puzzle, a story where the meaning of just two words opened a door, only to reveal a far more complex message that remains locked to this day.

“It is Ended”: The Linguistic Meaning of Tamám Shud

Initially, police were baffled by the phrase. But a local librarian soon identified the words as Persian (Farsi) and provided a translation: “It is ended” or “It is finished.” The words were not just random; they were traced to a specific source—the final page of a collection of poems called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This wasn’t just any book; it was a renowned work of 12th-century Persian literature, made famous in the English-speaking world through a popular 19th-century translation by Edward FitzGerald.

The Rubaiyat is not a narrative but a series of quatrains (four-line stanzas) that meditate on life, love, fate, and the fleeting nature of existence. Its core philosophy is often interpreted as a form of epicureanism or *carpe diem* (“seize the day”). Omar Khayyam’s verses urge the reader to enjoy the wine and companionship of the present, for life is short and the afterlife uncertain.

The phrase “Tamám Shud” thus carries immense poetic weight. As the final words of the book, they signify the ultimate conclusion, the end of the story. For the Somerton Man, was this a literary suicide note? A philosophical acceptance of his own mortality? Or was it a message to someone else, a signal that a particular plan or phase of life was complete? The clue was both profoundly meaningful and maddeningly vague.

The Book and the Code

The discovery set off a nationwide appeal. Police asked the public to search for a copy of the Rubaiyat that was missing its final page. Months later, a man came forward. He presented a copy of the FitzGerald translation he had found in the back of his unlocked car around the time the Somerton Man’s body was discovered. He hadn’t thought much of it until he saw the police appeal. When forensic investigators examined the book, they confirmed it was the source of the “Tamám Shud” scrap. But what they found on its back inside cover transformed the case from a potential suicide into a suspected espionage thriller.

Faintly penciled on the page were five lines of capital letters, a seemingly random jumble that looked like a code:

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

This was the true heart of the mystery. The Persian phrase was an elegant, literary clue, but this block of letters was a direct challenge. It was a message intended to be unreadable to the uninitiated, and over 70 years later, it remains so.

The Cryptolinguist’s Dilemma: Why is the Somerton Code So Hard to Crack?

Professional and amateur cryptographers, from World War II codebreakers to modern-day data scientists, have thrown everything they have at these five lines of text. All have failed. The difficulty lies in several key factors:

• Extreme Brevity: With fewer than 50 characters, the ciphertext is far too short for traditional frequency analysis. In a long coded message, you can count how often each letter appears and compare it to the standard frequencies of letters in a given language (for example, ‘E’ is the most common letter in English). Here, there simply isn’t enough data to establish a reliable pattern.
• Unknown Language and Cipher: We assume the underlying message (the “plaintext”) is in English, but it could be in German, Russian, or any other language. Furthermore, the encryption method (the “cipher”) is a complete unknown. Is it a simple substitution cipher (A=Q, B=X, etc.)? A more complex polyalphabetic cipher like a Vigenère cipher? Or could it be a one-time pad, a theoretically unbreakable system where the key is as long as the message and used only once?
• Possible Book Cipher: Given the code was found in a book, a “book cipher” is a strong possibility. In this system, the letters might refer to words or letters on specific pages of the Rubaiyat. For example, ‘WRGOABABD’ could mean “the Word on page R, line G, letter O…” and so on. Despite countless attempts, no one has found a logical system that works.

Clues Within the Code Itself

Even without a solution, the code offers small linguistic and structural clues. The second line, `MLIAOI`, is crossed out. This is a fascinating detail. Was it a mistake in transcription? A thought the author decided not to include? The correction implies a human hand at work, someone carefully crafting a message. The repetition of letters like ‘M’, ‘A’, ‘I’, and ‘T’ suggests it’s not complete gibberish, but the patterns are not simple enough to betray the underlying system.

Some have speculated the letters are not a cipher at all, but acronyms or initialisms. For example, the third line, `WTBIMPANETP`, has been fancifully interpreted as “Want To Buy IBM Pantechnicon”, an old type of moving van. Such theories are pure speculation and impossible to verify.

The Unspoken Language of the Dead

In 2022, researchers claimed to have identified the Somerton Man as Carl “Charles” Webb through advanced DNA analysis, though this finding is still being debated and verified by authorities. But even if we know his name, we still don’t know his story. Was he a spy, a jilted lover, a dancer, an engineer? We don’t know what brought him to Somerton Beach or why he died.

The linguistic clues he left behind are a study in contrasts. The Persian phrase *Tamám Shud* is elegant, universal, and emotionally resonant. It speaks of finality and the human condition. The code, however, is the opposite. It is clinical, opaque, and stubbornly silent. It is a locked box of information that may hold the key to his identity, his profession, and the reason for his demise.

The Somerton Man’s case endures not just because of the unidentified body, but because of this linguistic duality. He left us with a language we could understand but which told us nothing, and a language we cannot understand but which may tell us everything. His story is finished, but for the linguists and codebreakers of the world, the puzzle has just begun.