Phaistos Disc declared as fake by scholar

The Disc

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

I always held that the disk was a cherished artifact held by a parent or grandparent of a childs work, not a document just symbols pushed into clay at random by a young person.

It would be interesting to see if it is indeed as old or as young as some claim.

(tags:quote to ex)

[edit on 10/12/08 by Jbird]

This is interesting, I've grown up learning about the Phaistos Disc. Source?
Would certainly like to hear his reasoning behind this.

Yet another study on the famous disk

The Phaistos Disc: An Ancient Enigma Solved:

Two corroborative Old Elamite scripts can be deciphered using the Greek syllabic values obtained for the Phaistos Disc by A. Kaulins in 1980

Originally posted by MsMercy
This is interesting, I've grown up learning about the Phaistos Disc. Source?
Would certainly like to hear his reasoning behind this.

Basically, language... human language... has patterns. The patterns have rules -- for example, in English, "Obama beat McCain" is not the same as "McCain beat Obama" although both sentences have the same 3 words (you can get a PhD in linguistics -- I'm giving you the 5 sentence explanation of a very large field of study that's very complicated.) The rules tell us how to interpret the symbols to make sense.

Humans have several forms of written language -- symbols only, alphabets, combinations of the two (ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), as well as artificial languages. Writers can do very complicated things (as with ancient Egyptian where the phrase can run left to right or right to left and the word's spelling will be arranged to look nice in the space... you read it as a block of text and not letter-by-letter. Sometimes they misspell things, too.)

The disc has no real pattern that indicates it's a language, and in fact looks very much like someone (who wasn't a linguist) making up a set of symbols for a language.

Linguists do make up languages. A PhD linguist created the Klingon language for Star Trek, and other created languages exist. But when someone who knows languages makes up a language, they come up with something that's very unlike that of the "I'm going to make up a language" folks.

...and there's a lot of terribly boring detail that I'm not filling you in on. Check Wikipedia for some links on linguistics and languages and grammars and semiotics.

Originally posted by Hanslune
Yet another study on the famous disk

The Phaistos Disc: An Ancient Enigma Solved:

Two corroborative Old Elamite scripts can be deciphered using the Greek syllabic values obtained for the Phaistos Disc by A. Kaulins in 1980

That's pretty unconvincing, IMHO. I don't see them as similar or even derivative... and the rendering of the text is somewhat absurd. There's no sense in writing a linear script in a spiral just to give a math problem (on the other hand, there are some mathematicians who might do that for fun, but I don't see this as the case since the letters are stamped and not inscribed. Can't see some math hack sitting around with pre-carved symbols, stamping out a math problem.)

Yeah, I read about this a while back.

Here's Eisenberg's original paper on the forgery (he claims):

PDF file from Minerva Magazine

Here's the addenda and comments to the paper, published a little later:

2nd PDF file from Minerva Magazine

Bet you never guessed I could come up with those, eh Hans?

A lowly "failed Atlantologist" teaching high school math?
Street cred, baby.

Byrd, note the address - UTexas.edu

What has happened to your Longhorns? They got left out.

Hook'em, I say.

Harte



[edit on 12/10/2008 by Harte]

I dont know if I would be so quik to jump on the hoax band wagon on this one, this is just my untrained opinion, but it appears to me to be a story starting with the center symbol and spiraling out ward as if to signify the passing of time, or the evolution of the story. Just a thought, I havent had time to read through all the links but I hate to see so many people discredit the unexplainable by declaring hoax.

I'm holding out that it was an art piece by a child from ancient times - they are just going to have to do the Thermoluminescence thing - I wonder why they haven't?

[pats Harte on the head] well done. I grant you an honorary Ph.D in Archaelogy Research from the College of the bleeding foot and discount house of education.

I was a registrar once - so yes I can do that!