Introduction to the riddle

Footnotes :

1 For the date of Pernier's find, see Arthur Evans in Scripta Minoa I, page 22.

2 For the date of the earthquake, see I. J. Gelb: "A Study of Writing", The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, page 155; the circumstances of the find are from W. C. Brice, Ed.: "Inscriptions in the Minoan Linear Script of Class A, edited from the Notes of Sir Arthur Evans and Sir John Myres", Oxford University Press, London, 1961, page 21 bottom, and from J. Wilson Myers, Eleanor Emlen Myers, and Gerald Cadogan, editors: "The Aerial Atlas of Ancient Crete", University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1992, page 234: the Disk was found "in a layer of collapse in the northeast part [room 101]"; this room is shown on Fig. 33.3 and 33.4, pages 236 and 237.

3 R.W. Hutchinson: "Prehistoric Crete", Penguin Books, London, 1962, edition consulted 1968, page 66.

4 R.W. Hutchinson: "Prehistoric Crete", Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1968, page 69.

5 J.A. Sakellarakis: "Illustrated Guide to the Herakleion Museum", Ekdotike Athenon, Athens, 1983, page 30.

6 Per Ernst Döblhofer: "Voices in Stone - the decipherment of ancient writings and scripts", Granada Publishing, New York, 1973, pages 268 and 269.

7 as cited by R.W. Hutchinson in "Prehistoric Crete", Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1968, page 69.

8 As cited by Lionel Casson, Robert Claiborne, Brian Fagan, and Walter Carp: "Mysteries of the Past", American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1977, page 91.

9 Rudi Haas, as cited in Hans Blohm, Stafford Beer, David Suzuki: "Pebbles to Computers - The Thread", Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1986, pages 62 and 63.

10 As quoted in Joseph Alexander MacGillivray: "Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth", Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2000, page 134.

11 For a detailed deconstruction of that biased perception and its creator's tainted work, see Joseph Alexander MacGillivray's above-cited "Minotaur".

12 I. J. Gelb: "A Study of Writing", Revised Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1963, pages 106 middle and 156 top.

13 I. J. Gelb: "A Study of Writing", Revised Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1963, pages 10, 11, 27, and 79.

14 Nils R. Varney, Veterans Administration Medical Center, Iowa City: "Alexia for Ideograms: Implications for Kanji Alexia", Cortex - A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior", Masson Italia Periodici, Milan, 1984, pages 535-542.

15 I. J. Gelb: "A Study of Writing", The University of Chicago Press, 1963, pages 72-74.

16 Michael A. Hoffman: "Egypt before the Pharaohs", Dorset Press, New York, 1990, page 293 top.

17 as cited in Jacquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley: "Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization", Volume I of the UNESCO- sponsored "History of Mankind" series; Harper & Row, New York, 1963, page 653.

Picture credit for three photographs from Phaistos : Corel Stock Photo CD 67000 on Greece.

Picture credit for signs from Arkalochori Axe : redrawn from Fritz Schachermeyr: "Die minoische Kultur des alten Kreta", Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany, 1964, page 247.

For a comparison of the signs on this axe with similar ones from the Linear A script and from the Phaistos Disk,

see here.

The Religious Board Game on the Ancient Phaistos Disk
by Peter Aleff Scroll 1

1. Introduction to the riddle

Click on the thumbnails to find high-resolution versions of the same images

1.1. The find and its features

The Phaistos Disk has long been one of the most puzzled-about ancient artifacts in archaeology. Its pretty little pictures invite contemplation, and many people have sensed that there must be some special meaning behind those neatly arranged, visually attractive, and oddly intriguing signs. You will see here that these people were right beyond their highest expectations, though not in the way the authors of its many proposed translations may have ever imagined.

This object of continued curiosity turned up almost a century ago on the Mediterranean island of Crete, at the cult center of Phaistos on its southern coast. The Italian archaeologist Dr. Luigi Pernier discovered it there in July 1908 inside a rectangular clay compartment in a floor-level storeroom near the north-west angle of the palace¹.

The island of Crete is close to three continents.

Some ancient sites on Crete; Phaistos is near the middle of the south coast.

This Google Earth satellite image shows the Palace of Phaistos and the ongoing erosion of the hillside that has already claimed the southeastern corner of the palace grounds.


The ruins of the Bronze Age palace and cult center at Phaistos, and one of the giant storage jars found there.

Someone had placed the Disk into that cubbyhole about three dozen centuries earlier. An earthquake then buried it around or slightly before 1600 BCE under debris from the collapse of an upper floor which protected it and secured its dating².

That dating is well established because the same room contained also several vases of a style popular during the 17th century BCE, as well as a tablet inscribed with signs from the still undeciphered Linear A script which came into use at that time. This tablet had fallen to that level from an upper floor during the earthquake and has no other connection with the Disk³.

1.2. The Disk compared with writing tablets

Unlike the usually unbaked and mostly rectangular clay tablets which the ancient Cretans used for writing, the Disk is made of intentionally baked fine clay which Pernier compared to that in the fine pottery from nearby Kamares. It is also roughly round, with a diameter of slightly over six inches.

In further contrast to the writing tablets which were unruled back then and began to be ruled with parallel lines only a couple of centuries later, the Disk has a spiral-like track of irregularly long fields incised on each side, 30 on one and 31 on the other. These fields are all arranged between the curving borders of the track, and each field is separated from its neighbors in the sequence by radial lines incised between them.

Each of these fields contains two or more clear impressions of signs, for a total of 261 signs on both sides. These signs had been impressed with stamps for 45 different pictures of people, animals, and objects, and other signs. Some of these resemble shapes known from hieroglyphs or other well known symbols from that time and Eastern Mediterranean area, or even signs from Linear A, but most have no counterpart in any known script.

At best, a very few among those 45 different signs, such as the head profile with the hedgehog hairdo or the Y-shaped fork, could be more carefully crafted variations of some among the 15 equally stylized images of about ten types that had been scratched on a ceremonial bronze axe from nearby Arkalochori, as shown at left. That axe is dated to the same New Palace Period as the Disk.

However, these images on the axe are not much help because there are so few of them, and they offer no clue to their meaning.

The symbols on the Disk itself, if they were writing, would belong to an earlier period than the date assigned to it: they are primitive pictographs at a time when the much more advanced Linear A script had already been used at Phaistos perhaps a couple of hundred years earlier⁴.

One could try to explain the archaic look of those primitive pictures as sacred script in which older forms often survive, as happened in Egypt long after linear characters were employed for secular purposes. However, none of the missing links in this postulated evolution have been found, and the script theory would require more unsupported assumptions than Ockham’s razor allows.

1.3. Attempts to decipher the Disk as writing

That little Disk is so unique, and so puzzling, that it occupies a central glass case all by itself in the Herakleion Museum near Knossos in Crete. The guidebook there calls it one of the most valuable exhibits in the Museum and its "great enigma"⁵.

Indeed, that small piece of clay, no larger than your hand with spread fingers, has caused much speculation among amateurs and scholars alike who tried to recognize its origins as Lycian, Carian, Cypriote, Libyan, Anatolian, Semitic, and more⁶. It has also become probably the single most treasured target anywhere for the efforts of would-be decipherers who insist on "reading" its signs as "writing".

Some translated the Disk as a sacred hymn to the goddess Rhea, or to the Basque rainlord, or to the Zodiac sign Aquarius⁷. Others saw it as a legal document, a farmer's almanac and constellation list, a crossword puzzle⁸, or as a schedule for palace activities as well as a site plan description for the palace of Phaistos⁹.

One of the reasons for much of this confusion is that Sir Arthur Evans had insisted the signs on the Disk must be syllabic writing. He saw it as his mission to promote the Cretan- Mycenaean culture as the cradle and earliest blossom of European civilization, and the discovery of such beautiful writing would have added to the glories of that ancestral culture even more than the already known but rather utilitarian Linear A script that looked like chicken-scratches.

Already in 1894, before the Disk turned up and before Evans began his first dig, he argued in one of his Oxford lectures on early Greek scripts that a system of writing must have been developing in Crete and Greece because, as he asked rhetorically:

"Is it conceivable that in the essential matter of writing they were so far behind their rivals on the Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean?"¹⁰

Evans continued to reflect this Victorian preconception throughout his career, and his opinion carried much weight when he became the eminent excavator of the "Minoan" civilization who also coined its name and created much of its modern perception¹¹. Because of his authority in all things Minoan, his verdict became the reigning opinion¹².

However, this view contradicts some of its repeaters’ own documentation that the visual symbols of primitive picture writing tend to convey their meaning directly, without expressing speech or language or sounds. For instance, the scholar of ancient languages and writing systems I. J. Gelb wrote:

"The symbolism of visual images in the earliest stages of writings, like that of gesture signs, can express meaning without the necessity of a linguistic garment and both can profitably be investigated by a non-linguist. (...) In the beginning pictures served as visual expressions of man’s ideas in a form to a great extent independent of speech. (...)

At the basis of all writing stands the picture. This is clear not only from the fact that all modern primitive writings are pictorial in character, but also because all the great Oriental systems, such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, Chinese, etc., were originally real picture writings. (...) Syllabic signs are a later development from pictures of objects with like- sounding names".¹³

Some of these symbols were pictographs which means they represented the object depicted. Others functioned as ideograms in which the picture of, say, a boat, no longer means "boat" but expresses an idea like "travel". However, such associations of the object with its main qualities, uses, or features were usually direct, quite obvious, and widely recognized.

Pictographs and ideograms are also usually much easier to understand intuitively than the syllabic and/or phonetic systems of writing which evolve from them as a means of expressing more abstract ideas in a particular language.

For instance, my toddler son recognized the local supermarket’s logo on our shopping bags long before he learned to read the letters in it. Neurologists have confirmed that most people are inherently more able to understand pictographs and ideograms than signs with more abstract meanings. One of them noted, for instance:

"A number of cases have been reported of Japanese aphasics who developed a severe alexia for kana [the Japanese phonologic symbols of syllabic writing], but were relatively unimpaired in reading kanji", the parallel type of Japanese writing which is based on ideograms."¹⁴

The famous Narmer Palette from the beginning of Egypt's first dynasty is a typical example of such early emblem and rebus writing. It contains a few hieroglyphs as writing signs used for their phonetic value, but most of the signs on it are pictographic symbols that mean or allude to the object depicted¹⁵.

For words that were not easily pictured, such as the king’s name, the writers often used the phonetic rebus principle of substituting the picture of an object representing a similar- sounding word¹⁶.

Examples of modern picture- writing are the modern language- independent traffic signs and computer icons that each compress into a concise picture the often much longer written instructions that would be required to convey their meaning.

All this suggests strongly that the pictures on the Disk may have been meant as pictures. You will see in this book that their puzzle falls into place and conveys coherent as well as easily verified meanings when you take the pictures not as writing signs for syllables or sounds but at their face value as the easily recognizable symbols with well- documented ancient symbolisms which many of them are.

However, Evans was an authority, and most of those who attempted to tackle the Disk tried therefore to read those pictures as syllabic or phonetic writing, often with funny results. A century after its first publication, a web search yields long and steadily growing lists of proposed translations. For a small but varied sampling of such attempts, see Appendix 1.

More serious linguists concluded that "deciphering such an isolated document is impossible, and the content of the inscription must remain an enigma"¹⁷.

Check out the sampling of translation attempts in Appendix 1, or continue directly to the next chapter and the solution of that enigma.