Can you solve this mystery? (My players stay out!)

I'm putting together a Hollow Earth Expedition campaign, and have a mystery that's central to the game. I'm worried that it's going to be WAY too hard to figure out, because it requires several steps, understanding the nature of the riddle, and understanding the techniques to solve it. My players are very smart (one of them is often too smart), so this should be a hard challenge. But is it too hard? Is it even solvable? Can even the collective, brilliant minds of EN World crack it?

The Setup
There is a an ancient map that leads to a hidden civilization (and possibly tremendous wealth). It was created on a stone tablet, which has since been broken into 5 pieces.

The PCs will acquire each of the 5 pieces over the course of the campaign. Once they have all of them, they should be able to figure out where to go.

I'll have copies of these printed out, and hand them to the players as they discover the pieces. I expect it to take 5-6 weeks of game time to get all of them.

At least one of the characters has a background in ancient languages. So while the writing is unfamiliar to her, she should be able to understand the language once she deciphers the alphabet.







I'll start posting hints or additional contextual information if people want them.

Nareau

[sblock=Just in case I'm right]I guess I'm confused. Is there supposed to be something more to this mystery than them looking to the west of Italy for a hidden civilization?[/sblock]

Well, the first piece looks like, "X marks the spot off the coast of Italy." The rest I'm guessing is a letter substitution code. If I had a printout in front of me I think I could fiddle around and figure it out sooner or later. I might take a whack at it later.

http://www.comradesmack.com/images/together.jpg

Atlantis Maybe (if they do not know it leads to Hollow earth)?

No matter what, make the piece with the "x" be the last piece they find because seeing the x might tempt them to travel to italy without seeing the rest of the disk.

I'm putting together a Hollow Earth Expedition campaign,

Click to expand...

And there you go.

EMD's pic helps.

I would start by assuming its a letter sub code. At about one o'clock on the outer ring there is a symbol standing alone (looks like home plate with two lines coming down from the top). I would assume that is "a."

At about eleven o'clock on the outer ring is a three letter word. It might be "the," I would start by subbing in "e" for the last symbol (the "Jesus fish" standing on its tail).

If things look good, go ahead and sub in "t" and "h," and see what things look like at that point.

Heckler said:

EMD's pic helps.

I would start by assuming its a letter sub code. At about one o'clock on the outer ring there is a symbol standing alone (looks like home plate with two lines coming down from the top). I would assume that is "a."

At about eleven o'clock on the outer ring is a three letter word. It might be "the," I would start by subbing in "e" for the last symbol (the "Jesus fish" standing on its tail).

If things look good, go ahead and sub in "t" and "h," and see what things look like at that point.

Click to expand...

Something like this. I'm horrible at ciphers, but here's what you've suggested so far.

Now if the last two small words are "as it"...?

Looking at the letter frequency might help.

http://deafandblind.com/word_frequency.htm