An Ancient Mystery

     The Lapis Niger -- "Black Rock" -- in Rome was kind of a mystery to the Romans and it's even more so today.  It was widely considered to be an unlucky spot.  Supposedly the place in the Forum where Romulus was supposed to be buried, but wasn't; or possibly the tomb of his adopted father, or of a pre-Republic king or the king's grandfather, the location had a stubby column, a horseshoe-shaped altar with some guardian lion statues (think library lions) and a stelae with an inscription in a very old form of Latin.  It's almost impossible to read now and for most of their history, it wouldn't have been much easier for literate Romans to puzzle out.  Later on, the area was given black marble paving to mark it.

     There were ritual artifacts (possibly associated with kingly rule) buried in a layer of gravel under all this, and a sarcophagus that modern non-invasive methods have determined is empty.

     So, what's that stelae say?  It's a puzzle, and scholars have been picking away at it for decades.  The best read we've got is incomplete, but updated to modern language, it comes out to:

NO DUMPING OR LITTERING IN THIS GROVE. VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED [one?] COW, PAYABLE TO THE KING.

     You can go read it on Wikipedia (scroll down to the end of the section), but it looks like Ancient Rome was walking wide and careful of an unreadable "No Littering" sign that people knew was bad luck, even though nobody remembered why.