Astonishing Legends

On December 1, 1948, an unknown man was found lying dead on the sand on Somerton Beach next to the neighborhood of Glenelg, about 7 miles (11 km) southwest of Adelaide, South Australia. He had no money or identification on him, the labels in his clothing were cut off, and his minimal possessions yielded no clues. Further adding to the mystery, a rolled-up scrap of paper with the Persian phrase "tamám shud," translating to "is over" or "is finished," was found in the man's watch pocket around the time of his autopsy. The scrap was later discovered torn from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a circa 11th-century collection of poems by Khayyam, known as "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia." The book found tossed into a car after a public appeal by the police appeared to have previous writing indentations on a page adjacent to the torn-out one, revealing a local phone number and text speculated to be a coded message. With no further clues as to the Somerton Man's identity other than an abandoned suitcase left at