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===History=== On December 1st 1948, around 6.30 in the morning, a couple walking found a dead man lying propped against the wall at Somerton Beach, south of Glenelg. He had very few possessions about his person, and no form of identification. Though wearing smart clothes, he was without a hat (an uncommon sight at the time), and there were no labels in his clothing. The body carried no form of identification, and his fingerprints and dental records didnβt match any international registries. The only items on the victim were some cigarettes, chewing gum, a comb, an unused train ticket and a used bus ticket. <ref name=TamamShudWiki>''Tamam Shud Case'', Wikipedia Foundation Inc, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case</ref> [[Image:DeadBody.jpeg|thumb|170px|right|The Somerton Man shortly after autopsy]] The coroner's verdict on the body stated that he was 40-45 years old, 180 centimetres tall, and in top physical condition. His time of death was found to be at around 2 a.m. that morning, and the autopsy indicated that, though his heart was normal, several other organs were congested, primarily his stomach, his kidneys, his liver, his brain, and part of his duodenum. It also noted that his spleen was about 3 times normal size, but no cause of death was given, the coroner only expressing his suspicion that the death was not natural and possibly caused by a barbiturate.<ref name=inquest>Inquest Into the Death of a Body Located at Somerton on 1 December 1948. [[State Records of South Australia]] GX/0A/0000/1016/0B, 17β21 June 1949. pp. 12β13.</ref> 44 years later, in 1994 during a coronial inquest, it was suggested that the death was consistent with digitalis poisoning. <ref name=Phillips>Phillips, J.H. "So When That Angel of the Darker Drink", ''Criminal Law Journal'', vol. 18, no. 2, April 1994, p. 110.</ref> Of the few possessions found upon the body, one was most intriguing. Within a fob pocket of his trousers, the Somerton Man had a piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, reading "Tamam Shud" on it. These words were discovered to mean "ended" or "finished" in Persian, and linked to a book called the Rubaiyat, a book of poems by a Persian scholar called Omar Khayyam. A nation-wide search ensued for the book, and a copy was handed to police that had been found in the back seat of a car in Jetty Road, Glenelg, the night of November 30th 1948. This was duly compared to the torn sheet of paper and found to be the same copy from which it had been ripped. In the back of the book was written a series of five lines, with the second of these struck out. Its similarity to the fourth line indicates it was likely a mistake, and points towards the lines likely being a code rather than a series of random letters. WRGOABABD <del>MLIAOI</del> WTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTGAB
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