In the beginning of our century, a team of Italian
archaeologists, under supervision of Luigi Pernier, carried out
the excavation of the palace at Phaistos. In the year 1900 some
small rooms in the northern part f the site were unearthed. When
the last room finally was emptied in 1908, there was found,
beside a fragile claytablet covered with Minoan linearscript,
"The Phaistos Disc".
The subject in question is a well-preserved greyish brown almost
circular claydisc with a diameter on 6.5 inches and a thickness
of about 0.6 inches. Each side of the disc is decorated with
characters, which are imprinted with neatly manufactured dies.
The amount of different stamps, being used, is 45, and their
total occurrences are at 242 transfers. They are distributed into
61 groups of signs. The signgroups are affixed in spirals on both
sides.
The general opinion, according to the antiquity of the disc, is
that it shall be dated back to the 17th century B.C., but based
on uncertain factors behind the discovery, there has been thrown
doubt about its age, and the disc may prove younger, from about
1400 B.C. (i). Any certain statement of its age can therefore not be
done.
Even though the disc was found at Crete, many investigators have
adopted the presumption that it was imported, perhaps from Asia
Minor. Other suggestions about its origin are e.g. Egypt.
These presumptions rely on analyses of the figurative values of
the signs; some of the figures are analogous to Minoan objects
such as the crested warrior, which has resemblance to certain
Cretan claystatuettes. Further findings of tablets with similar
signs, as those known from the Phaistos disc, may apply the
answer about its place of origin. The direction of writing or
reading has been an occasion for considerations too. The most
general perception on this matter is that the signs have been
imprinted from the periphery towards the centre, and that they
are to be read in that same direction. Some few read in the
opposite direction. The considerations are in particular
motivated by the deformity, which can be transmitted from the
latest impression to the preceding one, as they are placed very
closely. Against this one may argue, that the transcriber simply
has been charged with printing a copy of a prototype, without
knowing the direction of reading himself. An unpleasant thought,
just to be mentioned en passant, is the possibility that the disc
might be a forgery misplaced by a practical joker, who made it
himself, cf. the Piltdown-man.
It is natural, that many attempts have been made to find the
meaning at the bottom of the hieroglyphs on the Phaistos disc,
primarily by attaching to them phonetic values; yet in the last
decades otherwise proposals have turned up, probably under the
impression of the failing progress of the philologists.
Allow me to give a brief account, in point of language, of the
methods of deciphering being tried, and the obstacles which were
involved. Besides the difficulties, as mentioned, concerning the
direction of reading, the place of origin etc. one is in a
linguistic approach, under the necessity of committing oneself to
what system of writing or which combination of systems, that are
employed. The most favourable chance, considering the era the
topic is assumed to fall under, is a syllabic writing-system
possibly combined with ideographs. The practise, that has been
followed, has roughly been the one of selecting some titles, some
place names or a pantheon, within a speech area. Subsequently the
expectations mainly have leaned against "words" as A14,
because the imprints in this group of signs have a high frequency
on the disc, by which A14 impart to the jigsaw puzzle with a lot
of pieces, in fact 68 out of 242, that is a fourth part of all
the signs.
As an assistance to interpret the phonetic value of a sign, the
rebus principle is obvious, and has been attempted occasionally (Ernst Sittig):
The three first or last figures in A14 are a crested warrior, an
oxhide and a vessel, which in Greek can be rendered as e.g.
anthropos, tavros and navs, giving the syllables a-ta-na =
Athena.
A more advanced entrance, which has been tested too, is a
comparison with the Mycenaean linear B syllabary. Michael Ventris
deciphered this type of writing in 1952. The entrance is to
enumerate the initial, medial and final positions of the
syllables in the larger statistical material of linear B, and
then afterwards to collate with the corresponding statistics in
the more limited material of the disc (ii). This approach is connected
with the shortcoming, that it fails to see the very likely
ideographs.
Taught by those unsuccessfully linguistic approaches, the
tendency is that the dictionaries are put aside for the benefit
of more careful analyses of figure- or structure-similarities. At
the same time attitudes of resignation have turned up,
manifesting themselves in terms as the following (iii):
1)
Dass der Diskos zeit er vor 60 Jahren
wiedergefunden wurde, viele Gelehrte und Laien fasziniert und
immer wieder Entzifferungsversuche hervorgelockt hat, ist gewiss
verständlich; wer sich aber dies Dokument zum Objekt seiner
Forschung wählt, muss sich nüchtern die Grenzen seiner
Möglichkeiten klar machen, wenn er nicht erleben will, dass
ausser ihm niemand an die Richtigkeit seiner Thesen glaubt. Wir
werden uns heute bescheiden müssen und können nur hoffen dass
eines Tages ein neuer Fund mit gleichen oder verwandten
Schriftzeichen uns Material zu einer zwingenden Lösung des
grossen Rätsels schenkt. (Gunther Neumann 1968)
2)
Anyone who claim to have deciphered a
script for which only 241 signs of nonalphabetic text are known
must expect his genius to go unrecognized until more texts turn
up. Not only is there not enough statistical information for him
to prove his claim, but by the same token there is not enough for
anyone else to disprove it. (E.J.W. Barber 1974)
3) Finally an attempt to deny the existence of the disc:
The possibility of translation into a
modern language is of course minimal. Beset with doubts,
qualifications and difficulties, the Disk is almost unreal and
only the fact that it was found by an excavator compels its
acceptance. (Stanley Dow 1973)
