It sounds like you've stumbled onto a relic that’s both a cipher and a canvas. In antiquity, we found things like the Egyptian tomb murals that double as hieroglyphic records—each pigment choice encoding a story or a ritual. And those Greek bronze plaques from the Hellenistic period, the ones that still whisper with tiny scratches, were often used to embed astrological data into their artistic motifs. So yes, art and lore were inseparable; the pigments were as much a ledger as a visual delight. Keep peeling back those scratches—each line might be a word, each shimmer a memory waiting to be translated.