
Phaistos Disc - cookingoils
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc
======
personjerry
Imagine you are a child, drawing random images out of your imagination. Fast
forward thousand years and the [clay disc|hard drive] you were working on is
found by archaeologists and they derive your entire culture from the random
mohawk face you thought up.

~~~
jjtheblunt
I thought the same exact thing. Cookie symbol? A ghost. The imagery looks
modern, and playful.

------
JoeDaDude
I find the theory that it is a game especially intriguing. In ancient times,
games were used as divination methods, a way to know the will of the gods [1].
The game theory explains many things, such as the uniqueness of the symbols
and the spiral pattern.

Board games, like language, music, and religion, have been created in every
culture [2] [3], but physical evidence is very scarce. Written evidence is
even more lacking. There are games we know of, but know very little of how
they were played or used (e.g.: Senet) [4]. Could the Phaistos disc be a rare
piece of physical evidence?

An entire book has been written about the Phaistos disk as board game [5]. I
can't speak to the specific theories/guesses made in the book, but the notion
that the disc is a game seems very plausible to this casual observer.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Games-Gods-Ancient-
Systems/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Games-Gods-Ancient-
Systems/dp/087728752X/ref=sr_1_12?keywords=board+games+ancient&qid=1567635148&s=books&sr=1-12)

[2] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2688609-ancient-board-
ga...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2688609-ancient-board-games-in-
perspective)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Board-Table-Games-Many-
Civilizations/...](https://www.amazon.com/Board-Table-Games-Many-
Civilizations/dp/0486238555/ref=sr_1_10?keywords=board+games+ancient&qid=1567635629&s=books&sr=1-10)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet#Gameplay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet#Gameplay)

[5] [http://phaistosgame.com/](http://phaistosgame.com/)

~~~
jacobolus
There are also a lot of old boards found by archaeologists which are assumed
to be game boards but might have instead (or also) been counting boards
(abacuses) used for performing calculations.

I’m fairly convinced (though I’m not an expert and it’s hard to be sure about
ancient artifacts without documentary corroboration) that backgammon, mancala,
and chess boards were originally used as calculation tools. Maybe senet too.

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cookingoils
For those interested in learning more about the disc, I would recommend The
Phaistos Disk: An Account of its Unsolved Mystery by Thomas Balistier. It does
a good job of explaining the various explanations of the disc and it’s
history.

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sandworm101
I think it is a contract of some sort. I think these are personal seals, each
group representing an individual. This might be some sort of guild or
religious group where members were identified with a series of random symbols,
akin to a social insurance or military service number.

Maybe people took home smaller representations so that in the future they
could be identified as having been part of the group. If that is the case,
this cannot be deciphered any more than one might decipher a list of phone
numbers.

~~~
wavefunction
I dunno, a list of phone numbers could tell you quite a bit. Are they roman
numerals or arab? How many digits? Are they standard length sequences or
variable? Are there any repeating patterns in the numeric sequences or
groupings?

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ocdtrekkie
Honestly, my biggest question is: Why did this get its own Unicode block? It's
weird that symbols found on literally one object in history have gotten their
own unique Unicode assignments.

~~~
joaomsa
The Proposal for encoding the Phaistos Disc characters[1] lists the motivation
behind including it (and rebutes some counter arguments). Principally, lots of
publications discussing the Phaistos Disc would use it:

> Phaistos Disc characters, whether syllables, or letters, or board-game
> dingbats, have historical and cultural significance, as attested in the
> large number of publications dealing with it. As noted above, the Wikipedia
> has articles about the Phaistos Disc in ten languages. The 30+ documents
> listed in the bibliography in this proposal are by no means the only
> documents printed which deal with the Phaistos Disc characters. The English
> Wikipedia article gives Phaistos Disc characters inline in text as well as
> in tables (Figure 8). Other documents exist which present the Phaistos Disc
> characters either inline (Figure 8) or in tables (Figures 1, 2, 5, 6, 7). It
> is true that the image of the Phaistos Disc itself is easy to represent with
> simple drawing (see Figure 3) but the discussion of its characters inline in
> Latin text is not.

[1]
[https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06095-n3066-phaistos.pdf](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06095-n3066-phaistos.pdf)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Thanks! I was poking around trying to figure it out, but did not find this.

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tiborsaas
I've seen it in Heraklion a week ago it was really interesting to see. We also
speculated a lot about it with my girlfriend :)

My ideas were

\- it's a showcase of different symbols in the workshop, but why repeat them
then?

\- a diary, a plan, a calendar

\- random doodling :)

But it's definitely one of the oldest compact discs out there.

~~~
cookingoils
That’s cool. I was there two days ago. Really amazing to see it in person just
for the sense of scale. It feels like it was made for just one or two people
to hold.

Wow, I was thinking along the same lines. I thought it could be a teaching
tool. Calendar or some sort of template also seems plausible.

------
codesnik
aand of course its symbols are in unicode already. I've heard that not every
modern bengali inscription could be represented in unicode.

------
grumblepeet
Looks like a good game, all you need are some dice and a couple of counters.

~~~
tempguy9999
And rules

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coldtea
Apparently, it's quite solved atm (the last attempt mentioned)? They're
missing terms, but it's basically a hymn to a goddess, or so this specialist
says:

[https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2018/02/07/gareth-
owens-50...](https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2018/02/07/gareth-
owens-50-phaistos-disk-deciphered/)

------
bediger4000
This is one of the very few real archaeological oddities: Phaistos Disk,
Antikythera Mechanism, Lenses of Gottland, maybe those jade funereal suits
from China that really seem to indicate "lost technologies" really existed,
and maybe if they'd not been lost, things would have turned out differently.

~~~
jacobolus
Check out
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat)

~~~
coldtea
Or:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery)

~~~
credit_guy
You should also mention the Pylos Combat Agate [1]. For those who haven’t seen
this before, if you open the wikipedia link on a cell phone, the image is
already higher than life size. Watch and be amazed. This incredibly detailed
work of art/ jewelry was created 200 years before the reign of Ramses II.
Whatever technology people had at the time that allowed them to make this, it
died with the Bronze Age Collapse (or before), and it took people one thousand
years to get to the same level of sophistication.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos_Combat_Agate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos_Combat_Agate)

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jbob2000
It looks hastily made, I like the theory that it’s a prayer or hymn. A
congregation would needs hundreds of these made whenever you had a new hymn or
prayer. You have to rotate it to read it, so presumably, as you are reciting
the prayer or the song, you rotate it to follow along.

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jjtheblunt
Doesn't that Phaistos disc's symbols look awfully like what a modern (Western,
at least) young person, just playing, would end up with?

Chocolate chip cookie symbol? Ghost symbol? And so on?

If it's indeed really old, how very interesting.

~~~
coldtea
> _Doesn 't that Phaistos disc's symbols look awfully like what a modern
> (Western, at least) young person, just playing, would end up with?_

Only in the sense that countless other picture based scripts (e.g. in Egypt,
Latin America, and so on), look like that...

> _If it 's indeed really old_

This is not under dispute by any archeologist.

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lihaciudaniel
Reminds me of Antikythera mechanism

