The Phaistos Disc, Europe's oldest 'printed' text

On 3 July 1908 the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier, excavating the Minoan palace of Phaistos in southern Crete, found a disc of fired clay about sixteen centimetres across. On both faces, arranged in a spiral, small pictorial signs had been stamped. The Phaistos Disc, now on display at the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, is one of the most enigmatic objects in Mediterranean archaeology and one of the most often reproduced.

Signs stamped with punches

The disc bears 242 sign impressions, belonging to 45 different types and grouped into 61 sections separated by incised vertical lines. Its most remarkable feature is the technique: the signs were not drawn by hand but pressed into the still-soft clay with punches, one for each type. Some signs were corrected after being stamped, which shows that the maker checked the text while composing it.

For this reason the disc is often described as the oldest example of a text produced with movable elements, many centuries before printing. The existence of the punches suggests they were meant for more than one object, but no other find bearing the same signs has come to light. The designs show human figures, heads with a plumed headdress, animals, plants, ships and tools.

Dating and context

The disc was found in a room of the palace together with Bronze Age material, and is usually dated to the second millennium BC, in a range many place between about 1850 and 1600. The conditions of the excavation, however, do not allow a precise stratigraphic date, and scholars have long debated the exact circumstances of the find described in the reports of the time.

The script corresponds neither to Linear A nor to Cretan hieroglyphs, although some signs resemble those systems. The most widely accepted reading direction runs from the outside towards the centre, from right to left, but this too has been debated. It is not even known for certain which of the two faces should be read first.

Many decipherments, no proof

Dozens of interpretations of the disc have been published: a religious hymn, a calendar, a text in Greek, in Luwian or in a Semitic language, even the rules of a board game. The problem is structural. With only 242 signs and no other text of the same kind, any proposal can be constructed, but none can be verified, because there is no material to test it against.

In 2008 the hypothesis was also put forward that the disc is a modern forgery, made at the time of the excavation. Most specialists reject it. The question could be settled by thermoluminescence dating, which measures when the clay was last fired, but so far such a test has not been authorised by the authorities who look after the object.

The Phaistos Disc continues to inspire jewellery, symbols and novels, and its spiral has become a familiar image well beyond the world of scholarship. For research it remains a unique document, precious precisely because it is isolated: a fragment of a writing culture of which, outside this small clay disc, we know nothing else.