We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
A five-by-five letter square reading the same in four directions.
Also known as: Rotas square, Sator arepo, Sator formula
SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS: a Latin word square that reads identically left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top. Found scratched at Pompeii, so it predates AD 79, and used as a protective charm for well over a millennium afterward.
A five-by-five square of Latin letters spelling SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, which reads the same in all four directions — a palindrome in two dimensions.
Attested at Pompeii and therefore in existence before the eruption of AD 79, making it among the oldest continuously used charm formulas in Europe.
Before AD 79
Used as a protective charm across medieval and early modern Europe — written on walls, on paper to be swallowed, and on objects — against fire, illness, and a variety of other harms depending on the local tradition.
Medieval and early modern
Its meaning is genuinely unresolved. The Latin is grammatically strained, 'Arepo' is otherwise unattested as a word, and proposals ranging from a Christian anagram of Pater Noster to a Mithraic or purely formal origin all remain unproven.
No proposed reading is established. Symbolwise records that the meaning is unresolved rather than picking among the competing accounts.
A square grid of five rows by five columns, each cell holding one capital letter, forming the same five words read across and down.