Historical Linguistics 3130 A

The Phaistos Disk

We discussed the Phaistos disk last class. The ancient city of Phaistos is located on the island of Crete just south of the Greek mainland. Excavations of the ancient palace began in 1884 and the Phaistos disk was discovered there in 1908 along with many artifacts written in Linear A. Some people believe that the "writing" is related to Linear A, but other say that the disk does not appear to be any kind of Linear A.

Ancient writing found on the island of Crete includes Linear A, which has never been deciphered, and Linear B, which has. There is a web page by a professor at the University of Texas with some good illustrations comparing Linear A and Linear B.

The Phaistos disk is a continuing puzzle which still eludes decipherment. Many people have recently claimed to have solved the dilemma, but all of them seem to have considerable flaws or make false assumptions. A web page in Greece has an excellent list of recent attempts to decipher the Phaistos disk with some discussion about the various claims and links to more information about many of them. It's well worth taking at look at.

A whole page of high-resolution pictures of the disk and some objects that may be related is available on a French web site. There is also very extensive discussion in French there.