Has the Key to Translating the Phaistos Disk Been Discovered?

Story at Greek Reporter:
Archaeologist Claims to Have Unlocked Phaistos Disk Mystery

By Philip Chrysopoulos -

 

Dec 16, 2015

The goddess of love, the Minoan Astarte, is the key figure that unlocks the mystery of the Phaistos Disk, according to linguist, archaeologist and coordinator of the program Erasmus of Crete Technological Institute; Gareth Owens.

Image from Crystalinks.com.

Speaking to the ANA – MPA news agency, Owens said that after new data found in his research, his theory has changed slightly compared to the position he had expressed about a year ago. The focus is no longer the “pregnant mother”, as originally estimated, but a “pregnant goddess” that takes shape in the face of Astarte, the goddess of love.

“There is no doubt that we are talking about a religious text. This is clear from a comparison made with other religious words from other inscriptions from the holy mountains of Crete. We have words that are exactly the same,” Owens said and added, “I suspect that the Phaistos Disc is a hymn before Astarte, the goddess of love. Words such as those mentioned on the disk have been found on Minoan offerings and as with today’s offerings, people pray when they are troubled, because of health problems or personal reasons. Man doesn’t change, after all.”

The archaeologist said he believes, moreover, that one side of the Phaistos Disk is dedicated to the pregnant mother goddess and the other to Minoan goddess Astarte. [Emphasis added.]

On the importance of the figure, Owens noted that Minoan Astarte was the goddess of love, war and the mountains and her origin lies in the east. “From ancient Mesopotamia, located in today’s Turkey, Astarte went to Cyprus and became Venus,” he said. [Um, Mesopotomia was never located in Turkey, today's Turkey or yesterday's Turkey.  It is to the south of modern Turkey's southern-most border.]

***************************************************************

I found article interesting because of the goddess angle, of course, but even more fascinating was some information in the comments written by a Peter Aleff about the Phaistos Disk being a board game.  I clicked on a link and voila, I was taken to an advertisement page for a book, Solomon's Sky: The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk, explaining the Phaistos Disk as related to ancient astronomical alignments and detailing the board game.

Well, after reading a few paragraphs I'll be honest - my eyes started crossing.  I'll leave the research and inquiry as to the origins of board games and continuing the argument about whether the Phaistos Disk is or is not a board game to others!  But it's out there if you are interested in reading Aleff's articles available online and purchasing his book.

More on the Phaistos Disc

The New York Times picked up the story about the Phaistos Disc possibly being a hoax. (Photo from NYT article by Judith Lange

July 30, 2008, 11:30 am
A Fake Ancient Disc?
By John Tierney

Now that we’ve disposed of the bogus “pre-Columbian” crystal skulls, we can consider a potential new hoax: the Phaistos Disc, whose purportedly ancient text has long resisted scientists’ efforts to decipher it. My colleague Bina Venkataraman explains the newest twist on its inscrutability: The hundred-year-old mystery of a famous ancient artifact, according to one art history scholar, might be summed up with a single word: hubris.

In the current issue of Minerva, an art and archaeology journal, Jerome M. Eisenberg calls the famous Phaistos Disc, thought to be a story or sacred text of unknown but ancient origin, a fraud. The flat, circular clay disc is about six inches in diameter, and its purpose and stamped pictographic script have been the subject of scholarly debate over the last century.

Until now, most scholars believed that Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, excavated the Phaistos Disc in Crete in 1908. Dr. Eisenberg asserts that Mr. Pernier created the disc himself, because he was jealous of the accomplishments of archaeologists like Federico Halbherr, who discovered the “earliest legal code found in Europe” in Crete in 1884, and Arthur Evans, who excavated the palace at Knossos, also in Crete.

In the article, Dr. Eisenberg builds a case to prove the disc is forged using painstaking detail about its symbols, discovery site and composition. He says that its “cleanly cut” edges and uniformity do not match up with the period’s clay tablets, which were baked only by accident in the fires that destroyed ancient palaces. That the script remains impossible to translate, he added, bolsters the view that Mr. Pernier created it to outshine his contemporaries. At a conference this fall in London, Dr. Eisenberg and scholars who defend the disc as authentic will discuss the artifact’s origins face to face.

Dr. Eisenberg’s argument sounds strong to me, and I’m curious to hear Lab readers’ thoughts on what this little episode says about competition in archaeology. But I’m also happy to hear from anyone who wants to defend Mr. Pernier, and anyone who cares to take a stab at deciphering the symbols and finding a message — maybe something like, “I can’t believe anyone would fall for this scam.” Or just a simple excuse from Mr. Pernier: “Hey, you know what they say: publish or perish.”
*********************************************************************************** There were comments - and a rebuttal:

16. July 31st,2008 7:17 am
Dr Jerome M. Eisenberg has written this article without knowing the work of the French scholar Jean Faucounau. This scholar, author of c. 30 papers and books on the Phaistos Disk’s problem has found the answer to ALL the enigmas which have led Dr Eisenberg to his theory. The conclusion is that the Disk is NOT a forgery — it is NOT “undecipherable” — it is NOT Minoan — its hieroglyphs are NOT borrowed from diverses Civilizations, as written by Dr Eisenberg — etc.The true culprits of this mess are the Redactors-in-Chief of the A.J.A. who have refused to print the reply by J. Faucounau to a biased and erroneous paper published in 2000 in this journal, under the signature of the scholar considered as “THE” best specialist in the field.
Jean-Henriet F.
— Posted by Jean-Henriet Faucounau

More on the Phaistos Disc

From The Daily Grail.com: Posted July 15th, 2008 by Greg Phaistos Disc a ... Phake?!... The provenance of one of archaeology's most mysterious artifacts, the 'Phaistos Disc', has been called into question by Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art. Eisenberg believes that Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier may have created the Phaistos Disc, and planted it at the palace of Phaistos in Crete, in order to outdo the discoveries of contemporary, English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans: Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US Treasury Department and the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlighted the forger's error in creating a terracotta “pancake” with a cleanly cut edge. Nor, he added, should it have been fired so perfectly. “Minoan clay tablets were not fired purposefully, only accidentally,” he said. “Pernier may not have realised this.” The Greek authorities have refused to give Dr Eisenberg permission to examine the disc outside its display case, arguing that it is too delicate to be moved. His misgivings could be laid to rest by a thermoluminescence test — a standard scientific dating test — but the authorities had refused, he said. One of the key mysteries surrounding the disc is the spiral of stamped symbols upon it; no-one has successfully identified or decoded their meaning. Under Eisenberg's theory, there would be a good reason for that - they are meaningless. Defenders of the Phaistos Disc have brought up the Arkalochori Axe - which features some characters similar to the Phaistos Disc - as a possible hitch in Eisenberg's hoax claim. Eisenberg's findings are published in the July-August edition of the archaeological journal Minerva.

Is the Phaistos Disk a Fake???

Whoa! The Phaistos Disk a fake?

From The Timesonline
July 12, 2008
Phaistos Disc declared as fake by scholar
Greek authorities will not allow the disc to be examined outside its case to not show enlarge option
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

Some say that its 45 mysterious symbols are the words of a 4,000-year-old poem, or perhaps a sacred text. Others contest that they are a magical inscription, a piece of ancient music or the world's oldest example of punctuation.

But now an American scholar believes that the markings on the Phaistos Disc, one of archaeology's most famous unsolved mysteries, mean nothing at all — because the disc is a hoax.

Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, “discovered” it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete.

Pernier was desperate to impress his colleagues with a find of his own, according to Dr Eisenberg, and needed to unearth something that could outdo the discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned English archaeologist, and Federico Halbherr, a fellow Italian.

He believes that Pernier's solution was to create a “relic” with an untranslatable pictographic text. If it was a ruse, it worked. Evans was so excited that he published an analysis of Pernier's findings. For the past century innumerable attempts have been made to decipher the disc. Archaeologists have tried linking them to ancient civilisations, from Greek to Egyptian.

Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US Treasury Department and the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlighted the forger's error in creating a terracotta “pancake” with a cleanly cut edge. Nor, he added, should it have been fired so perfectly. “Minoan clay tablets were not fired purposefully, only accidentally,” he said. “Pernier may not have realised this.”

Each side of the disc bears a bar composed of four or five dots which one scholar described as “the oldest example of the use of natural punctuation”.

Dr Eisenberg believes that it was added to lead scholars astray — “another oddity to puzzle them, and a common trick among forgers”. The Greek authorities have refused to give Dr Eisenberg permission to examine the disc outside its display case, arguing that it is too delicate to be moved.

His misgivings could be laid to rest by a thermoluminescence test — a standard scientific dating test — but the authorities had refused, he said. In Rome, this test cast doubt recently on the provenance of another iconic archeological object.

Experts are now contending that the Capitoline Wolf, the famous bronze sculpture of a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, founders of the city of Rome, dates from the Middle Ages, and not Etruscan times, as long has been held.

The Capitoline Museum's website says that the statue, known as Lupa, or she-wolf, is from the 5th century BC and was donated to the museum in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV.

However, in a front-page article this week in the Rome daily a Repubblica, Adriano La Regina, who for decades headed the national archaeological office for Rome, suggested that the museum was reluctant to release test results indicating that the bronze was medieval.

“The new information about the epoch of the Capitoline bronze has been held back for about a year now,” La Regina wrote. He added that the tests had produced a “very precise indication in the 13th century”.

The 30in (75cm) bronze is the centrepiece of a museum room named after it, and postcards and T-shirts with its image are popular Rome souvenirs.

Claudio Parisi Presicce, the museum's director, insisted that his institution was not trying to hide data that could subtract centuries from the she-wolf's antiquity, saying that the data “aren't definitive yet”.