The mysterious Phaistos Disc: a lost message from the ancient world

Scholars have been puzzled for more than a century by the spirals of strange pictograms on this 4,000-year-old artefact of the Minoan civilisation

In July 1908, the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier, during excavations at the site of the Palace of Phaistos on the south coast of Crete, discovered a small disc of baked clay in a basement cell.

Across both sides of the disc were 45 different symbols, or picture signs, unlike any known writing system — and ever since the enigmatic Phaistos Disc has captured the imagination, but not the agreement, of archaeologists, language experts and other researchers, professional and amateur.

Pernier dated the disc — measuring only six inches in diameter and now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete — to about 1700BCE.

Decipherments, both linguistic and non-linguistic, have ranged from the mundane to the fanciful: a poem, hymn, prayer, sacred text, magic inscription, curse or aid to a healing ritual, a funerary record, almanac, court list, political treaty, proof of a geometric theorem, list of soldiers, a board game and even musical notation for a stringed instrument.

That the picture signs are in spiral formats is significant in itself, of course, and could be an important clue to…