Roman Britain was a period of nearly 400 years between AD 43 to AD 410 when large parts of Great Britain were under occupation by the Roman Empire. During this period, the Romans built roads and architectural structures that can still be seen today. These include military structures such as forts and walls (including Hadrian’s Wall), Roman baths and aqueducts.

The Romans also introduced a number system based on roman numerals. These roman numerals are still used today, for instance on most analogue clocks, even though mechanical clocks did not exist at the time. Three main types of timepieces were used in ancient Roman times: The sundial, the klepsydra, and the obelisk.

A team of archaeologists has recently discovered some old parchments that include a map of the old roman city of Bath, Somerset, UK (Aquae Sulis) covered with Roman numerals from I to L (1 to 50). They also found 12 encoded messages and a piece of a golden sundial that they believed belonged to emperor Claudius. The legend tells that the sundial was broken in 13 pieces which were spread out and buried all over the city of Bath. The archaeologists would need your help to decode these messages, which they believe will help them locate the 12 remaining pieces of the lost golden sundial!
The Lost Roman Sundial – Code Breaking ChallengeOpen in New Window

The most prestigious art exhibition is about to start at Tate Modern, London, UK. For the purpose of this exhibition, paintings from all over the world have been securely transported to London using a state of the art protection system called the multi-safe.

The multi-safe contains 12 individual locked compartments which are large enough to store one painting each. Each compartment is locked using a rotating combination locking system. Each combination consists of 3 numbers.

For security purposes, the actual combinations are kept secret and the Gallery manager has only been given access to 12 coding puzzles that will be necessary to retrieve the combinations and unlock the multi-safe 12 compartments. The gallery manager needs you to help him access to the world’s 12 most famous paintings before the gran opening of the Expo Art exhibition.

Before attempting this task, you should practice unlocking this padlock, by spinning the padlock wheel and using the combination provided below:

You now have under 1 hour to unlock the 12 compartments of the secure artwork storing safe. Good luck!