Luigi Pernier dug this out of the Minoan palace at Phaistos on 3 July 1908: a fired clay disc carrying 45 distinct signs impressed 242 times, 123 on one face and 119 on the other, dated somewhere between about 1850 and 1400 BC. The signs were not scratched. Each one was pressed into the soft clay with its own stamp, which makes this an example of movable type roughly three thousand years before Gutenberg, made once and apparently never repeated. It has never been deciphered and probably cannot be: 242 impressions is far too little text to break a script whose language is also unknown, which is why the field is full of proposed solutions and empty of accepted ones. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete.
Heraklion, Crete, Greece
See it on the map
