The mysterious Phaistos Disc: a lost message from the ancient world
By: Geoff Ward
Tags: Crete, History, Ancient World, Archaeology, Goddess

S cholars 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 their meaning — the spiral being the age-old symbol, found in cultures the world over, of creation, life-giving and aspiration, of birth and rebirth, and of spiritual development and our identity with the universe (see my article here).

As far as I know, this avenue has not been explored in the context of the Phaistos Disc, although there are theories, which we’ll get to later, that tie in perfectly with the spiral symbolism: that the disc portrays an address to a goddess of childbirth or fertility.

The Phaistos Disc: Side A

The Phaistos Disc’s narrative, if that’s what it is, seems intended to be read clockwise from the outside of the spiral into the centre. On the outer edge of each side of the disc, there’s clearly a point where one should start reading: a straight line marked with five or six points. This can be seen on the right-hand side of the disc in the photo of Side A, just by the supporting bracket.

The first two picture signs on Side A, adjacent to the straight line with points, are a plumed head and a circle with seven points inside it, maybe a shield, a loaf or a sun symbol. On side B, the first two signs are repeated — they can be seen on the left of the photo of Side B, next to the straight line with points, just above the supporting bracket. Both pairs of symbols are grouped with other signs and sectioned off by a dividing line a little further along.

The Phaistos Disc: Side B

A rather charming explanation of the disc’s picture signs is that they might be a prototype of the centuries-old English nursery rhyme ‘Little Boy Blue’. This explanation — ‘an everyday story of country folk’ — was given in the 1980s by Christian O’Brien, an ancient history and languages specialist.

Pictorial text

O’Brien’s view was that the die-stamped vertical signs demonstrated a unique use of the earliest known Indo-European pictorial text, and described a ‘pastoral disaster’: the oxen of the seven lords escape from their field, stampede through corn, knock over beehives and disrupt the order of farming life.

Nearly 4,000 years ago, such an event could have been of great significance; the loss of a harvest could have been disastrous. Thus O’Brien likened the theme to that of ‘Little Boy Blue’:

‘Little Boy Blue’ by William Wallace Denslow, 1901

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,

The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.

Where is that boy who looks after the sheep?

He’s under a haystack, fast asleep.

O’Brien believed the disc’s simple picture language to be similar to, but pre-dating, the Sumerian cuneiform of the Kharsag Epics — regarded as the world’s oldest religious text, dated to about 2500BCE — and was evidence of a link between the Sumerian and Cretan civilisations.

Cuneiform is one of the earliest systems of writing, invented by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, and dating from about 3200BCE. It’s characterised by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by use of a blunt reed as a stylus. The word ‘cuneiform’ simply means ‘wedge-shaped’.

Tying in with O’Brien’s translation, the Kharsag Epics tell of the foundation of an agricultural settlement near Mount Hermon in modern-day Lebanon which O’Brien argued was the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden — ‘kharsag’ means ‘head enclosure’. It was thought, therefore, that the Phaistos Disc would be a significant discovery in the history of writing. O’Brien, whose work is a major feature of the Golden Age Project, considered it likely that the Phaistos Disc was a Cretan artefact carrying a story which had originated in Kharsag, and had been written in the original pictograms of the proto-Sumerian language (The Genius of the Few, Appendix F, ‘The Enigma of the Phaistos Disc’, 1985).

Christian O’Brien

Scholarly attempts at decipherment of the pictograms are thought to have little chance of success unless more examples of the signs turn up somewhere, as it’s considered there’s not enough context for meaningful analysis. Any translation without external confirmation, such as successful comparison to other inscriptions, is unlikely to be regarded as conclusive.

As recently as September, 2019, despite decipherment claims of recent years, the archaeologist Josho Brouwers, in Ancient World Magazine where he is editor in chief, wrote that no one had any idea what the symbols on the disc meant, and that any attempts to decipher them were unlikely to be successful.

It seemed clear they were some form of writing, with vertical lines perhaps used to group symbols together into words. However, the writing system was different from the other three forms of writing found in Bronze Age Crete — hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B.

Linear A is a writing system, used by the Cretans from 1800–1450BCE in the hypothesised Minoan (of Crete and other Aegean islands) language, belonging to a group of scripts which evolved independently of Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems. It was the primary script for religious and palace writings, and was discovered by the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), a pioneer in the study of Bronze Age Aegean civilisation.

The consensus is that no texts in Linear A have been deciphered. It was succeeded by Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans in an early form of Greek, and which shares many symbols with Linear A. This might indicate similar syllabic values, but neither these nor any other proposed readings give rise to a language that scholars can actually read.

Language family

Brouwers makes no mention of any similarities of the Phaistos Disc pictograms to Sumerian cuneiform. It was unknown what language the Cretans spoke in the Bronze Age, and texts that had survived to the present day were insufficient to make any strong pronouncements as to even what language family Minoan might have belonged to, or even if there was just one language.

The fact that each picture sign on the disc was stamped or pressed into the clay meant that someone went to the trouble of making a metal die for each symbol, rendering the disc the earliest known example of the use of ‘moveable type’, Brouwers added. This suggested that the disc, or at least its inscription, could have been mass-produced, although nothing else like it had been found to date.

In 2008, the Georgian mathematician Gia Kvashilava claimed the text was written in the ancient Georgian language — Proto-Kartvelian (Proto-Georgian) which existed before the invention of the alphabet — and was a religious chant to the Colchian (Colchis, Western Caucasus) goddess of fertility, Nana (Georgian Journal, October 19, 2018, first published August 31, 2017).

The theory here is that, 4,000 years ago, Georgian people lived on the Mediterranean coast before these regions were settled by Indo-European tribes.

Then, in high-profile media events in 2018, linguist Dr Gareth Owens, in collaboration with phoneticist Professor John Coleman, also linked the disc to a goddess, claiming decipherment after ten years of research.

Owens believes the disc is a prayer to the Minoan deity Aphaia, identified in Minoan Crete with Diktynna, the goddess of childbirth, and also related to light. Updating earlier findings, he concluded that Aphaia, as a goddess of childbirth on one side of the disc, is related to a pregnant goddess referred to on the other side.

It’s interesting that so many ancient goddesses representing fecundity and fruitfulness, nurturing and maternal love — Arianrhod, Ceridwen, Ceres, Cybele, Demeter, Gaia, Dana, Coatlicul and Kali, for example — have been symbolised by the spiral. All such figures might have derived from Isis of Ancient Egypt, the archetypal Universal Mother.

The Phaistos Disc is written in Minoan script and records the Minoan language, Owens maintains: ‘the best sample of ‘Cretan hieroglyphics’ … The script of the Phaistos Disc is also Minoan Linear A’ (EKT News, National Documentation Centre, Athens, February 13, 2018).

Unsurprisingly, Owens is not without his critics. Some Aegean Bronze Age script experts are unconvinced by his methodology and conclusions. Cretan hieroglyphs, a writing system used in Bronze Age Crete, predate Linear A by about a century; the two systems were used side by side during their history, but are regarded as undeciphered.

‘Owens’s ‘readings’ are based on a stack of unverifiable assumptions; his conclusions are unproven, and unprovable,’ wrote Brent David, adjunct professor at the Centre for Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne (Biblical Archaeology Society, October 30, 2014). ‘It’s not surprising, then, that so many scholars of Aegean Bronze Age scripts aren’t accepting them.’

It seems the Phaistos Disc still clings to its secrets.

Treasure or hoax

I first reported on the mystery exactly ten years ago (March, 2010) when the question of whether the Phaistos Disc was an ancient treasure or modern hoax was the subject of international debate. The suggestion it might be a forgery was probably generated by a hundred years of failure to decode it.

A plea to answer the question by carrying out a special scientific test had been turned down in Greece on grounds that the disc was a national treasure and ‘untouchable’. Controversy had arisen over the refusal to date the disc to prove once and for all whether it was a priceless artefact or a clever forgery from the early years of the last century.

If there was a possibility the disc was a forgery, it was thought testing would be avoided. If it was tested, the Heraklion Museum risked losing a prize exhibit. It was a much better attraction as an enigma; even an accepted rational explanation of its use would detract from the mystery.



Professor Ioannis Lyritzis, of the University of the Aegean, Rhodes, applied for a permit for a thermoluminescence test but the Greek Ministry of Culture’s conservation directorate refused because the test would have involved drilling into what they regarded as a unique artefact.



A twist was given to the dispute in 2009 by the mysterious disappearance of a petition calling for the test which was to be sent to the Ministry of Culture after the International Conference on the Phaistos Disk in London in the autumn of 2008. In an informal vote among the 40 scholars who attended, a majority favoured the disc’s authenticity.



But wealthy New York art collector Dr Jerome Eisenberg, an expert on ancient forgeries, was convinced that Luigi Pernier (1874–1937) forged the disc because he was jealous of the successes of fellow archaeologists, Sir Arthur Evans and the Italian Federico Halbherr (1857–1930), at other excavations in Crete.

Luigi Pernier

Dr Eisenberg, who himself applied for a thermoluminscence test in 2007 and was turned down, believed Pernier decided to outdo his rivals with a discovery that would astonish the archaeological community — a relic with an untranslatable pictographic text. Pernier had found nothing at Phaistos that could surpass or even equal the amazing finds at Knossos, Crete, by Evans, begun in 1900, said Dr Eisenberg.

Needless to say, this didn’t go down well in Greece. Professor of archaeology Dr Athanasia Kanta, then director of the Heraklion Museum, told me: ‘I have no doubt that the disc is authentic. We must not forget that it was found during excavations by a very eminent scholar. For us a hundred years later to accuse him of fraud without evidence which would stand in a court of law is inconceivable and very unfair.

‘How would you like it if, when you are dead and cannot answer back, somebody comes and says you are a felon or a thief?’

Because the Greek government doesn’t want the disc tested doesn’t mean its authenticity is problematic. Such a stance is not uncommon when such testing can cause damage to, or loss or theft of, artifacts.

Ultimately, as Christian O’Brien pointed out, the importance of the disc is of our own making; there’s no evidence that the scribe who conceived it intended it to be other than, for example, a child’s reading primer.

Comparisons of existing Linear A examples have led some scholars to believe the disc actually is a version of Linear A, while many scholars have dated it to 1700–1675BCE, supporting Pernier’s finding.

Very few now think the Phaistos Disc is a forgery. But we might never know for sure what it says. Its destiny could be forever to tantalise us with a lost message from the ancient world.