Phaistos Disc Discovered - July 3, 1908

The artifact known as the Phaistos Disc was discovered on this day in 1908.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, and welcome to this day in history class. It
is July three, and an artifact called the face Dose
Disc was unearthed on this day in nineteen o eight.
Here are some highlights of this history mystery. The face
Dose Disc was found during a dig at the old
palace of Minoan face Dose, and that's on the island
of Crete and the Mediterranean Sea. And it was actually

(00:24):
found in a basement of one of the buildings, not
in the actual palace itself. So the Minoans, if you're
not familiar with them, they were an ancient civilization that
flourished from roughly thirty five hundred to five thousand years ago,
and they were very known for making great palaces, just
enormous beautiful palaces, as well as their written language and

(00:46):
their artwork. So this disk is roughly thirty seven hundred
years old, so towards the end of the Minoan civilization.
It's made of fired clay, about sixteen centimeters or six
and a half inches across, and it's not completely regular.
The thickness varies a little bit, as does the diameter.
It's etched on both sides in this spiral pattern that's

(01:08):
made up of forty five repeating symbols for two symbols total.
So imagine kind of a clay frisbee with a spiral
pattern and a lot of little symbols on it. These
symbols are all stamped, and it also looks like there
are places where somebody made a stamp and then rubbed
it out to do it over or perhaps replace it
with a different stamp. And both of the sides of

(01:30):
the disk have one symbol at the center and then
they progress outward from there. On side A it looks
like a simple flower, and on side BAT it's more
like an abstract symbol of wavy lines and a rounded triangle.
The spiral lines that go to the center and some
other dots and dashes were all done by hand and
not with a stamp, or at least that's how it looks.

(01:51):
But there are so many things we don't know about
this thing. There's a debate over which direction you should
read it. Do you start with the symbols in the
center and work out or do you work from the
outside and work in And what do the symbols represent.
Some of them are really obvious pictograms, they look like
real things out in the world, but other ones are
really a lot more symbolic. Not sure what they might represent.

(02:13):
Some people have suggested that the symbols might represent syllables,
but according to linguists, they're not arranged in a pattern
that makes sense if they're symbols. Other people have said
maybe they are an alphabet, but forty that's a lot
of characters for an alphabet, so people are not quite
sure about that either. So in spite of all these

(02:34):
things that we don't know, a whole lot of people
have said that they have cracked the code, and in
today's era, these are usually accompanied by great trumpeting headlines
proclaiming face dose disc Decoded is more like people claim
base dose disc decoded. The most recent of these is

(02:54):
from teen when Dr Gareth Owens and Professor John Coleman
concluded the the disc maybe contains a prayer to a
Minoan goddess. Not trying to dis their work, just saying
believes not really a we definitely cracked the code. There
are also some people who think that this is all
a fraud. That was the conclusion of Jerome Eisenberg, who's

(03:16):
the director and owner of the Royal Athena Galleries in
New York and an expert on ancient art. He made
that claim in two thousand and eight. His hypothesis is
that Luigi Pernier, who is the person who discovered this disc,
fabricated the whole thing because he was envious that his
colleagues were making these great discoveries and he wasn't. So

(03:37):
testing could pretty easily determine whether this disk is something
that was made in or if it was instead made
thousands of years ago. The problem is that the museum
and Creed, where this is housed, would prefer it not
be tested. They make the legitimate points that it's impossible
to test it without in some way possibly damaging it.

(04:00):
People have talked about some not invasive methods of testing,
but most of the testing methods involved to involve taking
just a tiny, tiny amount of the actual disc, and
the museum is not willing to allow that. So Isisenberg
contends that it's not about preserving the disk, that the
museum is just worried about losing out on tourism dollars

(04:20):
if if it turns out that this whole thing is
a hoax. You can learn more about the Face does
Disc and the Minoan civilization on the August third episode
of Stuff You miss in history class called the Faise
Dose Disc of Minoan Crete, and you can subscribe to
this Day in History class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
and whatever else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow, we have

(04:42):
a subject that's not about American Independence Day, but it
is appropriate for it.