Atlantis

Atlantis: the Phaistos Disc

David Gibbins

The Phaistos Disc, from a replica of the original on display in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Diameter 15 cm, thickness approx. 1 cm.

These pictures show one of the most extraordinary finds ever made in archaeology, a pottery disc that also plays a central role in my novel Atlantis. It was unearthed in 1908 in the Bronze Age palace of Phaistos in southern Crete, and can be seen today in the archaeological museum at Herakleion. It measures 15 centimetres across and one centimeter thick, and is covered with symbols impressed into the clay. Despite almost a century of scholarship and speculation, spawning literally hundreds of articles, books and imaginative theories, the message of the symbols – if any - remains completely unknown.

The disc was excavated by Italian archaeologists within the palace, in a basement room they described as a ‘temple repository.’ The deposit dates from some time before the palace was destroyed, in the mid 2nd millennium BC, by earthquakes which may have been linked with the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano of Thera to the north of Crete. There was nothing found with the disk to suggest its function, although some form of religious association might be inferred from the palace context, in a place ruled and lived in by ‘priest-kings’; the adjacent ‘villa’ of Hagia Triadha has even been suggested as a kind of Bronze Age seminary. But like so much else surrounding the disk, the true workings of the Minoan ‘palaces’ are shrouded in mystery, and even if the disk were the possession of priests it could have been ‘secular’ in nature, for example some form of historical record.

The disc contains 241 stamped impressions, made up from 45 different symbols – many appearing repeatedly, with a frequency that suggests a form of writing. The symbols were made by pressing pre-formed seals into the clay, which was then fired. The spirals on both sides are segmented into a total of 61 ‘phrases’ or ‘words’, 30 on one side and 31 on the other. Some of the most distinctive signs are shown in the photos below: the ‘mohican’ head, the ‘mother-goddess’, the ‘citadel’, and the mysterious shape which is the basis for the menu bar on this website. The symbols and the disc are the inspiration for the cover design on many of the editions of my novel Atlantis.

Is the Phaistos disc merely decorative, or is it some form of magic or divination, only meaningful to priestly interpreters? Or is it truly a type of writing? If so, there are many possible ways to view the symbols, all of which are plausible at this period. They could be purely pictographic, their meaning obvious – a paddle represents a paddle, a boat represents a boat. Or they could be ideograms, where the representation might be more abstract – a boat might mean going by sea, or long-distance travel generally. Egyptian hieroglyphs – a Greek word meaning ‘sacred writing’, because so many were found in temples and tombs – include many ideograms. Or the system might be more developed – the symbols could be logographic, in which each symbol represents a word, or syllabic, in which they represent a syllable, or even alphabetic, like our own. Any of these systems or a combination of them could be the key to unlocking a message on the disk

Sir Arthur Evans, who oversaw the 1908 excavations, believed the symbols derived from somewhere outside Minoan Crete, and others have suggested possible similarities with early Anatolian and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Others have made comparisons with symbols associated with the early Cretan language of the Minoans, the language of the still largely undeciphered ‘Linear A’ script, also found at Phaistos. These arguments will probably never be conclusive because a broadly similar repertoire of symbols may have been used across the Aegean and Near East, a region where Bronze Age cultures held much in common. There is even dispute over the directionality of the symbols: Sir Arthur Evans at first believed they spiraled outwards from the centre, but he then changed his mind and most modern scholars believe the text spirals inwards.

There have been some brilliant decodings of ancient scripts from the Bronze Age: Jean-François Champollion in the 19th century with Egyptian hieroglyphics, Michael Ventris in the 1950s with Linear B, the script used by the Mycenaeans. But both breakthroughs were based on the certainty that a writing system was involved, and both depended on extensive comparative material – in Champollion’s case, the Rosetta Stone, and for Ventris the recognition that he was dealing with an early form of Greek. By contrast, there is no certainty that the Phaistos symbols represent a script, and there are no other finds that aid in decipherment, no ‘Rosetta Stone.’ As long as the disc remains unique, almost everything about it will remain a mystery – it could be no more than an idle whimsy from the past, or it could encode a message that would change our view of early civilization.

Close-up photographs of symbols on the Phaistos disc, from the replica pictured above. To some eyes, the disk lends itself most readily to pictographic interpretation: thus, the ‘phrase’ to the left - reading from the right, 'mohican' head, oxhide, ship, paddle, and two indeterminate symbols - might be a sentence about a sea voyage. But the system could as easily be syllabic or even alphabetic, with the symbols representing syllables or letters, in an unknown language. The symbols pictured here are among the most intriguing on the disk. The ‘mohican’ head, the most frequent of all the symbols, is a man whose head appears to be shaved to a plume, or who wears a helmet. The heavily robed woman may be a ‘mother-goddess.’ The pagoda like building, a ‘beehive’ to some archaeologists, is surely a citadel or multi-floored structure like a palace. And finally the most fascinating symbol of them all, prosaically labeled a ‘double-comb’ by some scholars, but thought by many to represent a palace floor plan. Is this Phaistos or Knossos, the place the Greeks later remembered as the ‘labyrinth’, or is it some lost ancient citadel which may be the key to the mystery of the disc?

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