Not the signs of the zodiac. A clock often has 12 figures arranged in a circle. Zodiac?
These are archaic/old style Chinese characters, still used even today for stylistic reasons. No, this isn't ancient. So it could be Chinese, Korean or Japanese. I'll lean toward the latter since this is bilingual in a way. It should be readable or mostly so to somebody here. Also, the cancel/handstamp looks like it reads "ken" which is a common Japanese handstamp meaning "inspected", "approved".
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