The Phaistos Disc

Movable type three thousand years early, and far too short a text to ever crack

In 1908 the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier was digging the Minoan palace of Phaistos, on the south coast of Crete, with his money running out. Phaistos was grand, with monumental staircases, yet unlike Knossos it had yielded almost no writing. On 3 July, in a plastered basement cell northeast of the main palace, among black earth, ash and burnt cattle bones, he found an intact disc of fired clay about 16 centimetres across, and a few centimetres away a tablet in Linear A. It was hailed as the find of the year, even by his rivals.

The Phaistos Disc carries a spiral of text on each face, 242 signs in all, 123 on one side and 119 on the other, drawn from 45 distinct symbols: men in various poses, a plumed head, a woman, a fish, a flower, a bee, a dove, a boat, axes, shields and hides. A scored line runs between the turns of the spiral, short strokes divide the signs into groups that look like words, and the text is read clockwise from the rim toward the centre. Unlike most Minoan clay, which survived only because the palaces burned, it was fired on purpose. And the signs were not drawn. Each was pressed into the soft clay with its own stamp, the same stamp reused wherever a sign repeats, which makes the disc an early instance of movable type thousands of years before Gutenberg. No other object stamped with those dies has ever been found.

Its date is disputed. Scholars have placed it anywhere from about 1850 BC to after 1400 BC, and some think the clay may not even be Cretan. Its perfect finish led some to suspect Pernier of forging it in his hunger for glory, but the find context was sound and most archaeologists now accept it as genuine.

What it says is anyone's guess, and the guesses run into the thousands, one of them a race game like the Egyptian mehen. Most assume a syllabic script like Linear A, but with only 242 signs and no other text in the same script, no decipherment can be tested. John Chadwick, who helped Michael Ventris crack Linear B, observed that even someone given the true reading by King Minos in a dream could never convince anyone else of it. Sir Arthur Evans numbered the signs 01 to 45, and in 2008 they were added to Unicode.

The disc has become a symbol of Crete, copied on souvenirs across the island. The original is in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion.