Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (24 page)

Most scholars now believe that the
Piri Reis map is no more accurate than
would be expected for a 16th century
portolan chart, deriving information
from existing geographical knowledge
and conjecture. There is no reason to
believe that Piri Reis based his map
on the work of a hypothetical ancient
super-culture. Certainly, it is possible
that he had ancient source material
that is now lost to us, but beyond that,
the Piri Reis map should be appreciated for what it is-a strikingly beautiful and historically important
document of medieval history.

Photograph by Maksim. (GNU Free Documentation License).

Replica of the Phaistos Disc.

The undeciphered Phaistos Disc is
one of the greatest puzzles in archaeology. Almost everything about this
ancient artifact is controversial, from
its purpose and meaning to its original area of manufacture. The mysterious clay tablet was found on the Greek
island of Crete, at the Minoan Palace
site at Phaistos. But who made it, and
what was it used for?

The sophisticated Bronze Age civilization of the Minoans reached its
height in the period c. 1700 B.C. and
began to decline about three centuries
later, when many of their palaces were
destroyed. The Phaistos Disc was discovered in 1903 by Italian archaeologists excavating at the ruined Minoan
palace of Phaistos. The archaeologists

came upon the strange object in a basement room in the northeast apartments
of the palace, together with a clay tablet inscribed in Linear A (an
undeciphered script used on Crete until around 1450 B.C.), and pieces of neopalatial pottery (c. 1700 B.c.-1600 B.C.).
The palace had collapsed during an
earthquake, which has been linked by
some researchers to the massive volcanic eruption on the nearby Aegean island of Thera (modern day Santorini)
c. 1628 B.C. The precise age of the
Phaistos Disc is disputed; the archaeological context of the find suggests a
date not later than 1700 B.C., though
the modern opinion is that it could
have been created as late as 1650 B.C.

The enigmatic disc is made of baked
clay with an average diameter of 6.2
inches, and a thickness of 0.8 inches.
Both sides of the disc are covered with
a hieroglyphic inscription arranged in
a spiral. The inscription was made by
impressing wood or ivory hieroglyphic
seals or stamps into the wet clay, and
then baking the clay at a high temperature to harden it. It has been noted
that occasionally on the artifact, a symbol slightly overlaps the one to its
right, which demonstrates that the
creator was stamping towards the left,
that resulted in the text spiraling inwards to the center. The Phaistos Disc
represents what is, in effect, the earliest form of printing anywhere in the
world.

Printed into the disc are a total of
242 individual impressions divided
into 61 groups by vertical lines; there
are 45 different signs, including depictions of running men, heads with
feather crowns, women, children, animals, birds, insects, tools, weapons,
and plants. One or two of these symbols have been identified as vaguely
similar to the Cretan hieroglyphs in
use during the early to mid-second
millennium B.C. What is so puzzling
about the artifact is why the Minoans
were using a primitive pictographic
language at the same time as Linear
A, a much more advanced script. Perhaps the primitive nature of the script
on the disc points to a much earlier
date for the object than is presently
accepted. However, this is not necessarily the case, as archaic forms of
writing often survive into much later
periods, usually in the form of sacred
or religious texts, as was the case
in ancient Egypt. Furthermore, the
text on the Phaistos Disc is unique;

no other examples of the script
stamped on it have ever been located.
This uniqueness, and the fact that the
text is fairly brief, makes it extremely
difficult to translate even a small part
of it. That the inscription was made using a set of stamps would imply that
there was large-scale production of objects impressed with this script, which,
for one reason or another, have not yet
surfaced in archaeological investigations.

A difficulty with understanding
the artifact is that no one knows exactly how the symbols on it are meant
to be interpreted. Does the disc contain a hieroglyphic inscription, or are
the pictograms meant to be taken at
face value? Although some images on
the Phaistos Disc are pictures of familiar objects, trying to understand
these literally does not help with obtaining any coherent meaning from the
disc. Many linguists believe the text
is a series of written signs representing syllables (known as a syllabary),
while others assume it is a syllabary
combined with pictorial symbols used
to express a concept or idea (known
as ideograms). The combination of a
syllabary and ideograms would make
it comparable to all known syllabaries
of Greece and the ancient Near East,
including Minoan Linear B script, hieroglyphic writing, and cuneiform.
(The latter consists of pictograms
drawn on clay tablets with a pen made
from a sharpened reed, and originated
in ancient Sumeria in the late-fourth
millennium B.C.) The Palette of
Narmer is an interesting example of
such texts. It was discovered in
Nekhen, (modern Hierakonpolis,) the
ancient pre-dynastic capital of Egypt,
by English archeologist James E. Quibell, in 1894. It dates roughly to
3200 B.C. and includes some of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions ever
discovered. The Palette of Narmer uses
a combination of hieroglyphs and pictographic symbols, which are to be
taken literally to mean what they depict, indicating a possible parallel with
the Phaistos Disc, in the sense that it
could be interpreted as containing a
mixture of ancient Cretan hieroglyphs
and pictographs.

The tremendous difficulty of translation without further examples of the
script has not dissuaded both scholars
and amateurs from attempting the
task. In fact, the unique nature of the
text has added to its mystique and enthralled rather than repelled investigators. The distinctiveness of the disc
has, unfortunately, meant that there
have been a number of highly imaginative and unsubstantiated translations and interpretations of the text.
Perhaps the most extreme among
them is that the object contains a message left thousands of years ago by extraterrestrial visitors, or an ancient
Atlantean civilization, for future generations to discover. The question of
what exactly the message contains or
why it was written in such a primitive
script by supposedly advanced aliens
(or Atlanteans) has, of course, never
been answered.

Over the last 100 years numerous
attempts have been made to try and
identify the language on the disc. In
1975, Jean Faucounau published a
translation, maintaining that the language was a pre-Greek, syllabic writing of a culture he identifies as
Proto-Ionians, a people with closer ties
to ancient Troy than to Crete. According to Faucounau's decipherment, the

Phaistos Disc describes the career and
funeral of a Proto-loanian king named
Arion. His translation has, however,
not been accepted as sound by most
scholars on the subject. In 2000, Greek
author Efi Polygiannakis published (in
Greek) a book entitled The Disc Speaks
in Greek, claiming that the inscription
on the disc was written in the syllabic
writing system of an ancient Greek
dialect. Dr. Steven Fischer's Evidence
of Hellenic Dialect in the Phaistos Disk
(1988) also identifies the text as syllabic writing in a Greek dialect.

One clue to the meaning of the object is the context in which it was
found. The fact that the Phaistos Disc
was unearthed in an underground
temple depository has persuaded
some researchers of its religious significance, suggesting that the text was
possibly a sacred hymn or ritual. Several image groups in the text are repeated, which would suggest a refrain,
and perhaps each side of the disc represents a verse from a song, hymn, or
ritual incantation. In fact, Sir Arthur
Evans, excavator of Knossos (the ceremonial and political center of Minoan
civilization), concluded that the disc
contained part of the text of a sacred
song. The original discoverer of the
disc, Italian archaeologist Luigi
Pernier, also believed it had ritual significance. Nevertheless, though the
Phaistos Disc was found at a Minoan
palace site, there is no absolute proof
that it originated on Crete at all. It
may have been imported from just
about anywhere in the Mediterranean,
or even from the Near East.

While a religious/ritual explanation is certainly a possibility, it
is only one of numerous ideas so far suggested for the Phaistos Disc. Theories include: an ancient adventure
story, an ancient calendar, a call to
arms, a spell written in Hittite (a language used in Turkey c. 1600-1100 B.c.),
a legal document, a farmer's almanac,
a schedule for palace activities, and a
game board. In his 1980 book The
Phaistos Disc: Hieroglyphic Greek with
Euclidean Dimensions, German author Andis Kaulins claims to have deciphered the mysterious script and
maintained that the language of the
disc was Greek, and that it contains
the proof of a geometric theorem. However, Kaulins' translation has found
little support among archaeologists
and linguists. In his 1999 book, The
Bronze Age Computer Disc, author
Alan Butler postulated that the
Phaistos Disc functioned as an incredibly accurate astronomical calendar/
calculating device. However, there is
no explicit evidence that the Minoans
had any detailed knowledge of astronomy, and even the Egyptian comprehension of astronomy at the time
was not detailed enough to support
Butler's hypothesis.

Not a single example of the
stamped or printed method of writing
on the Phaistos Disc has been found
in the numerous excavations carried
out on Crete over the past 100 years.
This complete lack of comparative material has suggested to some that this
disc is a forgery. Something that adds
to the feeling of unease about the
disc's authenticity is that specialists
in Mediterranean and Near Eastern
archaeology seem unwilling to get involved in the debate about the artifact.
A thermoluminescence dating test

would certainly prove whether the
object was made during the last hundred years, or if it did in fact date to
the Minoan period. So far the Greek
authorities have been unwilling to submit the disc to such a test. Consequently, the possibility that the object
is a forgery made in the early 1900susing the limited knowledge of the
Minoan culture available at the timeis perhaps a far-fetched, but by no
means out of the question scenario. In
connection with the hoax theory, an
intriguing find was made in 1992 in the
basement of a house in Vladikavkaz,
Russia. This was a fragment of a clay
disc, smaller in size than the Phaistos
Disc, but apparently a copy of it,
though the symbols on this disc were
incised rather than stamped. There
were rumours of a hoax, but the Russian disc mysteriously disappeared a
few years later, and nothing has been
heard since.

Despite the apparent thanklessness of the task, many researchers
throughout the world still work diligently attempting to decipher the disc.
But the extreme variations in the many
purported translations have made
scholars doubtful of any future success
at decipherment, and indicate to many
that while it remains an isolated example of its kind, the disc can never
be properly understood. We can only
hope that future archaeological excavations in Crete, or perhaps elsewhere
in the Mediterranean, will turn up further examples of this mysterious
script. Until then, the Phaistos Disc,
now on display in the archaeological
museum of Heraklion in Crete, will
remain a unique enigma.