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Friday, June 10, 2011

The Mysterious Phaistos Disc

While walking through the streets and shops of Plaka in Athens Greece back in February 2011, after unexpectedly landing there due to the fact I had be evacuated out of Egypt, I came across an interesting find in a gift shop. A small, round terra cotta disc with strange and unusual pictographs caught my attention, so of course I purchased the item.  

The nearly 4,000 year old original tablet was discovered by Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier back in 1908 while excavating the Minoan Palace on the South Coast of the Mediterranean Island of Crete. It is said to have originated from some other unknown location. It has been deemed authentic by most archaeologists, though a few have considered it to be an unlikely hoax.
This ancient tablet has intrigued linguistics over the past century and many have tried to decipher the spiral code containing 45 symbols in a text of 241 tokens. Many proposals have been suggested including: a prayer, a board game, a calendar, a token, a farmer’s almanac, or the story of the journey of humanity; and that its origin is possibly alien or Atlantean. The symbols do not resemble any other ancient languages from that time period or region and there are not enough contexts available for a proper and meaningful analysis.


More recent claims to deciphering the text include a book by Efi Poligiannaki, an article by the Massey twins who believe the text might be a magical text, possibly a curse, and other claims by  Andis Kaulins and Dr. Steven Fischer.
This one of a kind object is currently on display at the Heraklion archaeological museum in Greece.

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