Seit der ersten Publikation 1948 hat sich am zusammengefassten Ergebnis nichts geändert:
In terms of content, the “Map with Ship” is closely related to several other works in the collection. There is a string of crudely written Chinese characters, apparently copied from a Chinese source by someone not familiar with that writing system. In his 1948 study, Bagrow noted that the famed sinologist Bernhard Karlgren could only decipher a few of the Chinese characters, and those could be translated as “their names come from olden times.” The characters have been crudely copied, it seems, and indeed only a few can be read with any assurance. From the eleven characters in the inscription, one can make out the following characters with a measured degree of certainty: 丁, 的, 百, 出, 七, 四, 由, and 家.
As a whole, however, there seems to be no way to translate these characters into a proper sentence or phrase.
Olshin, Benjamin, The mysteries of the Marco Polo maps, 2014, S. 39
In terms of content, the “Map with Ship” is closely related to several other works in the collection. There is a string of crudely written Chinese characters, apparently copied from a Chinese source by someone not familiar with that writing system. In his 1948 study, Bagrow noted that the famed sinologist Bernhard Karlgren could only decipher a few of the Chinese characters, and those could be translated as “their names come from olden times.” The characters have been crudely copied, it seems, and indeed only a few can be read with any assurance. From the eleven characters in the inscription, one can make out the following characters with a measured degree of certainty: 丁, 的, 百, 出, 七, 四, 由, and 家.
As a whole, however, there seems to be no way to translate these characters into a proper sentence or phrase.
Olshin, Benjamin, The mysteries of the Marco Polo maps, 2014, S. 39