The Phaistos Disc

[Gwen Parker]

The Phaistos Disc dates back to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age. Its purpose and meaning, and even where it was originally made, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. It's now on display at the archaeological museum of Herakleion in Crete, Greece.  Though clearly written with Linear A, it has yet to be deciphred!

[Gwen Parker]

It was discovered in the basement of room 8 in building 101 of the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, near Hagia Triada, on the south coast of Crete. Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier recovered this remarkably intact "dish", about 15 cm in diameter and uniformly slightly more than one centimetre in thickness, on July 3, 1908 during his excavation of the first Minoan palace.

It was found in the main cell of an underground "temple depository". These basement cells, only accessible from above, were neatly covered with a layer of fine plaster. Their context was poor in precious artifacts but rich in black earth and ashes, mixed with burnt bovine bones. In the northern part of the main cell, in the same black layer, a few inches south-east of the disc and about twenty inches above the floor, linear A tablet PH-1 was also found. The site apparently collapsed as a result of an earthquake, possibly linked with the explosive eruption of the Santorini volcano that affected large parts of the Mediterranean region ca. 1628 BC.

[Gwen Parker]

Dating

Yves Duhoux (1977) dates the disc to between 1850 BC and 1600 BC on the basis of Luigi Pernier's report, which says that the Disc was in a Middle Minoan undisturbed context. Jeppesen (1963) dates it to after 1400 on the basis of a wrong translation of Pernier's report. Doubting the viability of Pernier's report, Louis Godart (1990) resigns himself to admitting that archaeologically, the disc may be dated to anywhere in Middle or Late Minoan times. J. Best (in Achterberg et al. 2004) suggests a date in the first half of the 14th century based on his dating of tablet PH 1.

[Gwen Parker]

Similar objects

No object directly comparable to the Phaistos Disc has been found. There are, however, a small number of comparable symbols known from other Cretan inscriptions, known summarily as Cretan hieroglyphs. First, there is the votive double axe found by Spyridon Marinatos in the Arkalohori Cave, which has "similar, but not identical" glyphs. (Kober 1948:88) The altar stone found at Malia is more distantly related. Finally, there is a seal fragment (HM 992), dated to the 18th century, bearing the "double comb" sign (21). No inscription made with the same set of stamps has been found. Other artifacts bearing spiral-shaped inscriptions are known both from Crete and the Aegaean in general, and even from Etruria. A spiralling Linear A inscription is found on the golden ring of Mavro Spelio near Knossos (KN Zf 13). The Iron Age Discus of Magliano bears a spiralling inscription in Etruscan.

A very peculiar find was made in 1992 in a basement in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia: A fragment of an apparent copy of, or draft for the Phaistos disc, with the symbols incised with a stylus rather than imprinted. It is uncertain whether this artifact is genuinely ancient, a good faith modern copy of the Phaistos disc, or a bad faith attempt at forgery. The house with the basement in which the fragment was found was built in 1880. Allegedly, the object was recognized as a fake and returned to its private owner.

[Gwen Parker]

Movable-type printing

The inscription was apparently made by pressing pre-formed hieroglyphic "seals" into the soft clay, in a clockwise sequence spiralling towards the disc's center. It was then fired at high temperature. The unique character of the Phaistos Disc stems from the fact that the complete text was produced by pressing pre-formed hieroglyphic "seals" into the soft clay, reproducing a body of text with reusable characters.

The Phaistos Disc is sometimes classified as an early, if not the first, document of movable type printing. The German professor for linguistics Brekle, who defines typography as movable type printing, writes in his article 'The typographical principle' in the renowned Gutenberg-Jahrbuch:

An early clear incidence for the realisation of the typographical principle is the notorious Phaistos Disc (ca. 1800-1600 BC). If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a “printed” text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographical principle. The spiral sequencing of the graphematical units, the fact that they are impressed in a clay disc (blind printing!) and not imprinted are merely possible technological variants of textual representation. The decisive factor is that the material “types” are proven to be repeatedly instantiated on the clay disc.

Other authors, who are primarily concerned with its decipherment have called the disc in passing comments as "the first movable type", too.[3] Having been variously dated between 1850 and 1350 BC, the Phaistos Disc precedes later inventions of movable type by more than two millenia.

Building off this idea, Jared Diamond, in his, Guns, Germs and Steel, cited the Disc as an example of a technological advancement made at the wrong time in history. He cited the disc (and the lack of any rise in movable type in the Minoan culture) as evidence of the enigmatic problem of necessity and invention (which one leads which). He claims that we often invent things without clear need, as evidenced by the Phaistos Disc. Sometimes such inventions take off while other times they do not. He reasoned that movable type was less efficient than simply scribing by hand in clay so the technology never developed in the Minoan civilization. He compared it to Gutenberg's printing press citing its further development as due to a large number of commercial backers and societal growth which nurtured cheaper access to printed word

[Gwen Parker]

Side A (Original).

[Gwen Parker]

Side B (Original).

[Gwen Parker]

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Signs

There are 241 tokens on the disc, comprising 45 unique signs. Many of these 45 signs represent easily identifiable every-day things. In addition to these, there is a small diagonal line that occurs underneath the final sign in a group a total of 18 times. The disc shows traces of corrections made by the scribe in several places. The 45 symbols were numbered by Arthur Evans from 01 to 45, and this numbering has become the conventional reference used by most researchers. Some symbols have been compared with Linear A characters by Nahm, Timm, and others. Others scholars (J. Best, S. Davis) have pointed to similar resemblances with the Anatolian hieroglyphs, or with Egyptian hieroglyphs (A. Cuny). In the table below, the character "names" as given by Louis Godart (1995) are given in quotation marks; where other description or elaboration applies, they are given in parentheses.

The Phaistos Disc signs have been provisionally assigned Unicode Range 101D0–101FF, to include the 45 signs themselves as well as the combining oblique stroke described below. (Prior to the provisional acceptance of the characters for encoding, the ConScript Unicode Registry has assigned a block of the Unicode Private Use Area to be used for the script. Two fonts include support for this area; Code2000 and Everson Mono Phaistos.)