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 (second millennium BC), 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 16 cm (6.3 in) in diameter and is covered on each side with a spiral text, consisting of a total of 242 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 50 cm (20 in) above the floor, Linear A tablet 'PH-1' was also found.

Dating Yves Duhoux (1977) dates the disc to between 1850 BC and 1600 BC (MM III in Minoan chronology) 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 (LM II–LM III in Minoan chronology). 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 (MM I–LM III, a period spanning most of the second millennium BC). Jan Best suggests a date in the first half of the 14th century BC (LM IIIA) 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 16 cm (6.3 in) in diameter and almost 2 cm (0.8 in) thick, with rounded edges. More precisely, the outline is slightly egg-shaped, with the diameter varying from 15.8 to 16.5 cm (6.2 to 6.5 in) and the thickness from 1.6 to 2.1 cm (0.63 to 0.83 in). 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:

If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a "printed" text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographic 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. 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

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