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The Phaistos Disc, or Phaistos Disk, is a disc of fired clay from the island of Crete, Greece, possibly from the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (second millennium BC), bearing a text in an unknown script and language.

The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier during the excavation of the Minoan palace of Phaistos. The disc is about 16 cm (6.3 in) in diameter and is covered on each side with a spiral text, consisting of a total of 241 occurrences of 45 distinct signs, which were created by pressing individual sign stamps onto the soft clay before firing. While its unique features initially led some scholars to suspect a forgery or hoax, the disc is now generally accepted by archaeologists as authentic. The disc has captured the imagination of amateur and professional palaeographers, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs.

The Phaistos Disc was discovered in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, near Hagia Triada, on the south coast of Crete; specifically, the disc was found in the basement of room 8 in building 101 of a group of buildings to the northeast of the main palace. In the northern part of the main cell, in the same black layer, a few centimetres south-east of the disc and about 50 cm (20 in) above the floor, Linear A tablet 'PH-1' was also found.

Yves Duhoux (1977) dates the disc to between 1850 BC and 1600 BC (MM III in Minoan chronology) on the basis of Luigi Pernier's report, which says that the disc was in a Middle Minoan undisturbed context.

The most remarkable feature of the Phaistos disc is that the embossed signs that comprise its inscription all result from pressing separate stamps – one for each symbol – into the soft clay before firing.

The assigned Unicode names are PHAISTOS DISC SIGN followed by the names shown under Name in the table below, taken from a 1995 book by Louis Godart.

Evans, at one point, published an assertion that the disc had been written, and should be read, from the center out, because it would have been easiest to place the inscription first and then size the disc to fit the text. There are 61 such "words" on the Disc, with two to seven sign occurrences each: 31 on side A and 30 on side B.

The following is a rendering of the Phaistos Disc inscription in Unicode characters from the Phaistos code block (code points +101D0 to +101FC).

Ipsen concluded that the disc was certainly from somewhere on the Aegean; however, because of its differences from Linear A or B, he, like Evans, supported a non-Cretan origin for the Disc. Female images with pendulous breasts have also been found at Malia and Phaistos.The Arkalochori Axe also bears a short inscription that uses several signs similar to those of the disc.

Parallels with several Minoan objects discovered after the Phaistos disc all suggest the disc's authenticity: for instance between the "comb" (sign 21) and symbols discovered on a sealing in 1955 and a bowl in 1965; between the spiral layout and that of a ring discovered in 1926 at Knossos; and with several signs known from fragments of Impressed Fine Ware from Phaistos.

While the Phaistos disc writing system is, on the whole, very different from other known scripts, several scholars have argued against it being an entirely independent invention.

Parallels between the Phaistos disc script and Anatolian hieroglyphs were proposed, among others, by S.

A set of 46 symbols from the Phaistos Disc, comprising Evans's 45 signs and one combining oblique stroke, have been encoded in Unicode since April 2008 (Unicode version 5.1).

Kober, "Cryptanalysis, Decipherment and the Phaistos Disc.", in M.-L.

Quick Facts

• The disc was discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier during the excavation of the Minoan palace of Phaistos.
• The following is a rendering of the Phaistos Disc inscription in Unicode characters from the Phaistos code block (code points +101D0 to +101FC).
• Yves Duhoux (1977) dates the disc to between 1850 BC and 1600 BC (MM III in Minoan chronology) on the basis of Luigi Pernier's report, which says that the disc was in a Middle Minoan undisturbed context.
• The disc has captured the imagination of amateur and professional palaeographers, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs.
• Female images with pendulous breasts have also been found at Malia and Phaistos.The Arkalochori Axe also bears a short inscription that uses several signs similar to those of the disc.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Phaistos Disc". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.