Where did you find it? On a map or a rock. Different locations have different meanings. 7 on a rock means campsite, while 7 on a map (paper) means gold.
At first blush, it looks like an angled "T" for Tesoro (Treasure)
HIO Merc: See if these can help you interpret. Generally the long arm indicates direction, and the dots distance. Distance can be in whatever unit they used for measuring. A Var is approx. 39", a codo 1/2 of that. As for other measurements, trial and error. Luck.
The Walking Vara was the distance between steps for an average Spanish Soldier. I think 39 inches was a little much. More like 32 to 35 inches. A measured Vara is 33 inches.
I think to give you a more accurate meaning of the symbol, we would need more info. Is it Spanish/French/English/Mexican/?? Other symbols around it, etc. I see you live in Australia. Does that mean it's English?
As a symbol by itself, it could mean that a treasure is buried either between two rocks, or the dots could show what the depth is, or a half dozen other meanings. Without more info, it's tough to guess.
I'm thinking this isn't a Spanish symbol at all. It is probably from another "language" entirely, so it's meaning could vary quite vastly. We'd need to see more of the symbols to know for sure.
BTW, notice the top dot is about twice the size of the bottom. Could mean something.
I'll throw something at ya! Try this. One could have distance and degree in that one mark? Notice, you can see an X there with one bar missing. Thats the way to go! And you also then have X= 10. Plus 2 dots, = 2 ------- = Go the way of missing bar for 12 measurements of distance. Plus this could be a 1/2 way to your mark? So with that have a great day.
Usually, in Spanish (I'm not certain about English or French) mapping, the longest arm is the direction of travel, or the longest arm points towards something else on the page which gives more details.
People used a cipher for a reason, to hide a message in plain sight. If you were dealing with a plain and simple straight forward Pig Pen cipher, it would be easy for you or most anybody else to decipher. To make things more difficult and to try to protect the message from those you didn't want to see it, another level of encoding such as "transpostion" was incorporated into the cipher. You may want to try and start the alpha-bit where the letter W or Y is located in the Pig Pen cipher, and if that doesn't work you may want to try something else. May be the W and Y are the initials of the person who wrote the cipher, like William Yates.
can any of you help me with this turtleback. I am wondering what the black mark on the side may mean.as you can see, the bottom pic is the top of the turtleback. The pointer is on the far side.