The Phaistos Disc Was Stamped 1700 BC and Still Stamps Around Decipherers

On July 3, 1908, the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier was excavating the Minoan palace at Phaistos, on the south coast of Crete, when his team uncovered a small fired-clay disc lying flat on the floor of a basement room. The object is 16 centimeters across, almost two centimeters thick, and stamped on both sides with 241 individual sign impressions arranged in a tight inward spiral. There are 45 distinct symbols. The clay had been deliberately baked, which is unusual for Minoan tablets and was very likely intentional — somebody wanted this thing to last.

Pernier's discovery is notable for two reasons besides its inscrutability. The first is that the symbols weren't cut by hand. Each was made by pressing a separate prefabricated stamp into the wet clay before firing. There must have been a set of 45 dedicated stamps used to produce the disc, which means the production process is essentially printing — close to a millennium before any other documented use of movable type. Whoever made the disc was implicitly committed to making more than one of them, and a single piece simply happened to survive.

The second is that the script has resisted decipherment for more than a century, despite many published attempts. There are roughly 60 sign-groups separated by radial vertical strokes, which most scholars take to be word boundaries. Whether the underlying language is Minoan, Mycenaean Greek, or something not preserved elsewhere is unsettled. The disc is at most one and a half artifacts of its kind: a single fragment from a Cretan altar at Mochlos preserves a few possibly related signs, but everything else is unique. Some specialists have proposed it is a forgery; the consensus, especially after fabric analysis in the 2000s, is that it isn't.