The Phaistos Disk

The Phaistos Disk has resisted scholarly attempts at translation for over a century, illustrating the ways that cryptography operates exactly the opposite of the “Indiana Jones” method: no flash of laterally thinking insight will work here. Dating from about 1700 BCE, the Phaistos Disk was found on the Island of Crete, and is made of fired clay. It contains 45 symbols, most of which appear nowhere else. Some of the questions that linguists have faced with this include: do the signs correspond with syllables? Concepts? A mixture? Is it relevant when a sign is upside-down? Are the oblique lines on the disk meaningful, and if so, in what ways? Does one read from right-to-left? Inside to outside? Linguists have catalogued the frequency of signs on the disk to try and shake out meaning. They have also compared the symbols to other ancient scripts from the Aegean and environs, like Linear A and B and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and have proposed an array of possible translations. One of the most recent scholarly arguments is that the disk is a prayer to a mother goddess, but the idea has not received universal endorsement by linguists.