Posted on 12/20/2015 6:53:53 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Herodotus wrote that the Persians told him that the Phoenicians had lived "on the shores of the Erythraean Sea", his term for the entire Indian Ocean, but in this case probably referring to the Red Sea (modern Eritrea may have taken its name from this older term). Herodotus also refers to the circumnavigation of Africa, an expedition bankrolled by the Egyptian pharaoh but carried out by the Phoenicians, who departed from the Red Sea, arriving a couple years later in the Nile Delta. Thanks Cronos.
I've often been impressed by the fact that this is the only known example of writing done with this particular set of dies. This is actually an ancient example of moveable type use, if memory serves, the earliest one known. The authorities there refuse to have scientific dating done, but it isn't nearly as old as is generally claimed.
That does raise suspicions.
They have a reasonable alibi, which is the uniqueness of the artifact.
Nobody knows for sure where the Minoan culture came from, or how it fitted into the pattern of European cultures that surrounded it. The Phaistos Disc gave me sufficient evidence to recognise the Minoans as an offshoot of the great Bronze Age megalithic cultures of Britain and France. These people were the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, and you can learn more about them on the 'Megalithic' Page.
Various languages have been suggested, some of which are rather improbable, such as Basque or Finnish. According to one scholar, the text is a list of soldiers; to another it is a hymn to the "rain lord"; another believes that here the king speaks about the construction of the palace at Phaistos.
However, some symbols, such as the central flower on Side A, and the "two-container" symbol are found in Pharaonic Egypt in the Old Kingdom, but not later. For example, the Palette of Narmer has the flower pictograph, and a cartouche attributed originally to Cheops by the Egyptologists has the two-container symbol... The site Phaistos on Crete was a geodetic point in antiquity and the Disc shows how pre-Pythagorean geodetics were calculated. As a matter of information technology, the Phaistos Disk is also unique in that it unknowingly "anticipates" storage of information on CDs or DVDs, i.e. circular data storage. The deciphered content of the Phaistos Disc is mathematical in nature. It is a pre-Euclidean proof viz. lemma regarding the paradox of Parallel Lines, very similar in approach to that used by the great mathematician Lobachevsky, more than 3500 years later.
Grapheus says Faucounau's translation reveals "a kind of psalm, psalmodied during the corresponding mortuary ceremony describing the history and the death of a king named Arion... Face A relates the king Arion's achievements, Face B the circumstances of his death and the details concerning his burial... The Disk is Cycladic and has been brought to Crete as a trophy, then discarded when the 'Temple Depository' at Phaistos was cleaned up after an earthquake..."
Some hieroglyphic sequences recur like refrains, suggesting a religious hymn, and Pernier regards the content of the text as ritual. Others have suggested that the text is a list of soldiers, and lately Davis has interpreted it as a document in the Hittic language in which a king discusses the erection of the Palace of Phaistos.
[this is a font set for either Mac or PC]
This is the earliest known example of a printed inscription -- some scholars suggest that it's an isolated work of solitary genius, a religious poem or incantation. Although theories abound, no one has definitively identified the meaning of the pictograms or confirmed its origins. Some believe that the object is of Anatolian origin, despite being found on Crete.
Eduard Dhorme, one of the decipherers of Hittite, published the first consonantal values for the Proto-Byblic script in SYRIA XXV 1946 in an article, "Dechiffrement des Inscriptions Pseudo-Hieroglyphicques de Byblos." A comparison of these values with the symbols of the Phaistos Disk yielded consonantal assignments for a surprising amount of the writing on the disk. It should be noted here that all previous attempts to decipher the Phaistos Disk have been subjective attempts, assigning phonetic values to the characters with no true objective criteria. This is therefore the first effort at cracking the disk by OBJECTIVE determinations. When these consonantal values are examined, elements of an Hellenic language emerge in the text of the disk. Scholars had never known what the significence of a mysterious "slash" on 16 of the words of the Phaistos Disk. We observed, based on our values, that each of these 16 words are numerals counting commodities on the disk, similar to the majority of Linear B texts.
The original intention for this page was to limit the contents to web links. However as time goes by visitors to this page kept volunteering book references and I felt obliged to add the references that were sent to me.
Lost Languages:[snip] Amusingly, the author reproduces a letter to The Economist magazine regarding its article on the Phaistos Disk. The letter calls it a century old fraud (the disk, not the magazine) that could be exposed as such using thermoluminescence. [p 298].
The Enigma Of The World's
Undeciphered Scripts
by Andrew Robinson
He also mentions Barry Fell as having translated the Phaistos Disk and the rongorongo texts from Easter Island, but without further discussion of these achievements.
The chapter on the Phaistos Disk is interesting but unsatisfying because of the lack of a discussion of Fell (while the Fischer "translation" is discussed in depth, merely in order to dismiss it). On 306-307 there are some illustrations of the Arkalochori axe found on Crete. The haft has two types of "crested" heads (one face one, one in profile) somewhat resembling what Robinson calls the "Mohican" glyph that is the most common symbol on the Phaistos Disk. That (and a very weak second example) are all that has been found on Crete resembling the PD hieroglyphs in a century of excavation.
As Fell pointed out, the typeface (these characters were impressed on the clay using dyes, making the disk the oldest known example of a text printed with moveable type) is straight out of Anatolia. That source is what led to his decipherment of it -- he began by assuming it was from the Anatolian group of tongues, and came up with a workable and plausible translation.
Fell's Linear A translation is similarly useful and can be applied to other inscriptions. I've used it in my unskilled way on a coin, as I posted on my Ancient Times list on the Globe (October 9, 2000). [/snip]
A fascinating list of conjectures, contradictory hypotheses, and ego influenced search for truth. So, do you think that Fell or anyone else has nailed it?
I don’t see how there could possibly be enough data on that disk to be able to analyze and decipher it.
But I’m not a cryptologist and I don’t play one on TV.
I think Fell did, but I'd love it if someone (probably in Anatolia) turned up the ancient workshop with the dies used to make the disk, and (as long as I'm wishing) other samples 'written' the same way.
It's a tough crack, and given that there are no other known examples per se, there's no way for anyone to come up with a definitive decipherment. The author of that book up there made the same point about Linear A, which exists in very few samples.
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