Phaistos Disc
The Phaistos Disc, or Phaistos Disk, is a disc of fired clay from the island of Crete, Greece, possibly from the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age, bearing a text in an unknown script and language. Its purpose and its original place of manufacture remain disputed. It is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion. The name is sometimes spelled Phaestos or Festos.
The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier during the excavation of the Minoan palace of Phaistos. The disc is about in diameter and is covered on each side with a spiral text, consisting of a total of 241 occurrences of 45 distinct signs, which were created by pressing individual sign stamps onto the soft clay before firing. While its unique features initially led some scholars to suspect a forgery or hoax, the disc is now generally accepted by archaeologists as authentic.
The disc has captured the imagination of amateur and professional palaeographers, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs. While it is not clear that it is a script, most attempted decipherments assume that it is; most additionally assume a syllabary, others an alphabet or logography.
Discovery
The Phaistos Disc was discovered in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, near Hagia Triada, on the south coast of Crete; specifically the disc was found in the basement of room 8 in building 101 of a group of buildings to the northeast of the main palace. This grouping of four rooms also served as a formal entry into the palace complex. Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier recovered the intact "dish" on 3 July 1908 during his excavation of the first Minoan palace.The disc 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 content 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 centimetres south-east of the disc and about above the floor, Linear A tablet 'PH-1' was also found.
Dating
Yves Duhoux 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 dates it to after 1400. Doubting the viability of Pernier's report, Louis Godart resigns himself to admitting that archaeologically, the disc may be dated to anywhere in Middle or Late Minoan times. Jan Best suggests a date in the first half of the 14th century BC based on his dating of tablet PH-1.Physical description
Material
The disc is made of fine-grained clay. Some authors have stated that the clay does not appear to be of local origin, perhaps not even from Crete. It was intentionally and properly fired, unlike tablets and seals that were baked only accidentally.Shape and dimensions
The disc is approximately cylindrical, about in diameter and almost thick, with rounded edges. More precisely, the outline is slightly egg-shaped, with the diameter varying from and the thickness from. The disc is slightly concave on side A and convex on side B.Typographic writing
The most remarkable feature of the Phaistos disc is that the embossed signs that comprise its inscription all result from pressing separate stamps – one for each symbol – into the soft clay before firing. Thus the disc can be seen as an early example of movable-type printing. Typesetter and linguist Herbert Brekle writes:A medieval example of a similar blind printing technique
is the Prüfening dedicatory inscription of 1119 AD.
Popular-science author Jared Diamond describes the disc as an example of a technological innovation that did not become widespread because it was made at the wrong time in history. Diamond contrasts the process with Gutenberg's printing press.
Scribed lines
Besides the stamped symbols, there are a few markings made by scoring the moist clay with a sharp stylus. On each side there is a continuous spiral line that separates successive turns of the text. The strip between successive spires of this line is divided into sections by short radial lines, so that each section contains a few whole signs. The presumed start of the text, adjacent to the edge, is also marked by such a radial stroke, with the addition of five dots punched along it with the stylus. Finally, under some of the stamped signs, there are short oblique strokes.Signs
Sign list and counts
There are 45 distinct signs on the disc, occurring a total of 242 times—123 on side A and 119 on side B. In addition to these, a small diagonal line was incised with a stylus underneath some signs, a total of 18 times. The 45 symbols were numbered by Sir Arthur Evans from 01 to 45, and this numbering has been adopted by most researchers.The signs were added to the Unicode universal computer character set in 2008, after a 2006 proposal by Michael Everson and John H. Jenkins. In the following table, the No. column is the Evans number of each sign; the Glyph column is a modern drawing of the symbol; and the Font column uses the UCS font available in the browser. The assigned Unicode names are PHAISTOS DISC SIGN followed by the names shown under Name in the table below, taken from a 1995 book by Louis Godart.
One sign occurrence on side A is too damaged to identify. According to Godart, it may be sign 03 or 20 ; or less probably 08 or 44. Theoretically, it could also be a 46th distinct sign.
The sign images below are reversed left-to-right relative to their appearance on the disc, reflecting their presentation in most Western books and articles.
Also, some signs occur in the disc in two or more orientations, rotated by 90 or 180 degrees. It is generally assumed that the rotation has no semantic or linguistic value, so the rotated copies are still the same symbol. Therefore, the "normal" orientation of those signs is not known, and might have been left to the scribe's discretion.
Nature of depicted objects
Many of the signs are depictions of concrete objects with a recognizable general nature, or parts thereof. However, in most cases the precise nature of objects depicted is still unknown. The sign names assigned by scholars, in particular by Godart and the Unicode consortium, were rather arbitrary, often based on the slightest shape similarity.Symbol 21 was once conjectured to be a palace floorplan. However, this hypothesis was cast in doubt by the discovery of a vase with a nearly identical symbol incised on the bottom, believed to be a potter's mark.
Symbol 20 was assumed to be the conch of a large sea snail, such as Tonna dolium or some Eudolium or Charonia species. One such conch was found at Phaistos and is believed to have been used as a musical instrument for ritual uses.
Sign distribution
The distribution of symbols is highly non-random, and quite different between the two sides. Evans's symbol 02 is the most frequent one, occurring 19 times—14 of them on side A. The next most frequent signs are 07, with 18 occurrences, mostly on side B; 12, with 17, mostly on side A; and 27, with 15, of which 10 on side A.Still, 26 of the 45 symbols occur on both sides, at least once on each. The most common signs that occur on only one side are 31, on side A, and 22, on side B; both with five occurrences each.
The following table shows how many distinct signs have the same number of occurrences. The third number in each column is the product of the two numbers above, that is, the total number of occurrences of those signs:
| Frequency | 19 | 18 | 17 | 16 | 15 | 14 | 13 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | - |
| Sign count | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 6 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 8 | 9 | Total = 45 signs | ||||||
| Token count | 19 | 18 | 17 | 15 | 12 | 44 | 7 | 36 | 15 | 24 | 9 | 16 | 9 | Total = 241 tokens |
The nine hapaxes are 04, 05, 11, 15, 17, 30, 42, 43, 44. Of the eight twice-occurring symbols, four occur on side A only, three on side B only, and only one occurs on both sides.
Sign correlations
The distribution of symbol pairs too is highly non-uniform. For example, of the 17 occurrences of sign 12, thirteen follow immediately sign 02.Text
The following is a single image of the text "unrolled". While the order of the characters is left-to-right reversed, the signs themselves are in the original orientation.Directionality
Evans, at one point, published an assertion that the disc had been written, and should be read, from the center out, because it would have been easiest to place the inscription first and then size the disc to fit the text. There is general agreement that he was wrong, and Evans himself later changed his mind: the inscription was made, and should be read, in the clockwise sense, from the outside in toward the centre, as with the similar spiral inscription on the Lead Plaque of Magliano."Words"
The signs are laid out on each side as a single spiral text, which is split by the inscribed radial strokes into groups. These groups are conventionally called "words", even though their true linguistic or other nature is not known. Both ends of the text on each side are also assumed to be "word" boundaries. There are 61 such "words" on the Disc, with two to seven sign occurrences each: 31 on side A and 30 on side B. These "words" are conventionally numbered A1 to A31 and B1 to B30, reading from right to left.There may be one additional radial stroke near the center of side A, over-stamped by the sign 03, between sign 10 and the central sign 38. However, most scholars ignore that possible stroke and count the last three symbols as a single "word" 10-03-38.
On both sides, there is a radial line also right before the start of the text, with five dots punched along it using a sharp round stylus.