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Phaistos Disk
I'm currently enthralled reading the most excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel. (Thanks, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cow!) While discussing the invention and spread of writing, it mentioned the Phaistos Disk, something I had never heard of before.
In 1908 a ceramic disk was found at a dig at the Minoan palace at Phaistos. In a spiral on both sides are a series of hieroglyphic looking characters. But there are only 45 unique characters on the disk, out of 241 total, strongly suggesting a syllabary or even an alphabet. It is the only example of this writing ever discovered, not obviously related to Linear A or Linear B, the scripts all other Cretan documents were written in.
Weirdest, and most tantalizing of all, is it was printed. 2,500 years before printing appeared in China, 3,100 years before Gutenberg. Each character was imprinted with a separate stamp of raised type.
It's important to keep in mind that writing in Crete at that point was only done by a very small number (less than 100 total) of palace scribes, for official palace business only. They used a horribly ugly, kludgy script that was kind of a bastard child of hioroglyphs and shorthand. Someone saw this and not only invented (what looks like from a very limited sample) a far cleaner and more elegant system of writing, they invented printing at the same time. And then it was forgotten.
Lots of translations have been attempted, but none of them are even slightly convincing. Some people claim it isn't writing at all, but a game board. It might not even be native to Crete, but a trinket someone brought back from another land.
Ever since I read this a few hours ago I've been imagining a Leonardo level genius living in the palace. He is a noble or a priest or something -- access to resources but with time and political freedom to dabble in weird ideas. His work is admired sometimes but usually ignored as impractical. Printing with individual stamps into clay is pretty impractical, probably not significantly easier than scratching character with a stick. Changing the writing system of a society is impractical. No one cared if their writing system sucked, because only a handful of scribes had to bother with it, and they probably preferred the job security.
I picture him as a classically horrible salesman-geek. He gets too excited by his solution and can't describe it properly to other people. He is constantly making needless changes. Why the spiral pattern? Why the overly complicated (much more complicated than the crude scratchings of Linear A and Linear B) characters? He didn't bother to sell it as anything except a complete package: spiral writing using his new characters using his new printing stamps. He then got distracted when no one seemed interested and ran off to work on something else.
It would make such a wonderful basis for historical fiction. I wish I was the type to write novels.
Phaistos Disk randomness:
A proposal to add the characters to unicode
A review of the world's oldest hard disk
cow!) While discussing the invention and spread of writing, it mentioned the Phaistos Disk, something I had never heard of before.In 1908 a ceramic disk was found at a dig at the Minoan palace at Phaistos. In a spiral on both sides are a series of hieroglyphic looking characters. But there are only 45 unique characters on the disk, out of 241 total, strongly suggesting a syllabary or even an alphabet. It is the only example of this writing ever discovered, not obviously related to Linear A or Linear B, the scripts all other Cretan documents were written in.
Weirdest, and most tantalizing of all, is it was printed. 2,500 years before printing appeared in China, 3,100 years before Gutenberg. Each character was imprinted with a separate stamp of raised type.
It's important to keep in mind that writing in Crete at that point was only done by a very small number (less than 100 total) of palace scribes, for official palace business only. They used a horribly ugly, kludgy script that was kind of a bastard child of hioroglyphs and shorthand. Someone saw this and not only invented (what looks like from a very limited sample) a far cleaner and more elegant system of writing, they invented printing at the same time. And then it was forgotten.
Lots of translations have been attempted, but none of them are even slightly convincing. Some people claim it isn't writing at all, but a game board. It might not even be native to Crete, but a trinket someone brought back from another land.
Ever since I read this a few hours ago I've been imagining a Leonardo level genius living in the palace. He is a noble or a priest or something -- access to resources but with time and political freedom to dabble in weird ideas. His work is admired sometimes but usually ignored as impractical. Printing with individual stamps into clay is pretty impractical, probably not significantly easier than scratching character with a stick. Changing the writing system of a society is impractical. No one cared if their writing system sucked, because only a handful of scribes had to bother with it, and they probably preferred the job security.
I picture him as a classically horrible salesman-geek. He gets too excited by his solution and can't describe it properly to other people. He is constantly making needless changes. Why the spiral pattern? Why the overly complicated (much more complicated than the crude scratchings of Linear A and Linear B) characters? He didn't bother to sell it as anything except a complete package: spiral writing using his new characters using his new printing stamps. He then got distracted when no one seemed interested and ran off to work on something else.
It would make such a wonderful basis for historical fiction. I wish I was the type to write novels.
Phaistos Disk randomness:
A proposal to add the characters to unicode
A review of the world's oldest hard disk