The Minoan tablet we still can't solve

3rd of July, 7pm, the year 1908, on the island of Crete, amongst the ruins of an ancient palace called Phaistos. As the sun was setting over the hills, a tablet was unearthed, covered in enigmatic markings. Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier wrote, I'm delighted to announce that tonight we found in a new excavation northeast of the plateau of Acropolis of Phaistos, a clay disk, diameter 0.16, covered with Minoan pictographic signs, over a hundred, stamped in concentric circles. We are faced with one of the most important monuments of early Cretan writing. We know this clay disk as the Phaistos disk. It's about 3500 years old and it has evaded explanation for about 117 years. It was discovered here in a room at the edge of this enormous two-acre palace complex that sits atop a commanding hill, whose corridors and squares once echoed with the hum of ancient life. The disk has an A-side and a B-side. It contains 45 distinct signs, 241 characters, which are divided into 61 words, or at least we think these are words. You can see the words here, they're divided into these little cells and basically we can't read this. We can't read this at all. I'm afraid I've fallen down a rabbit hole guys. I love an enigmatic artifact. They're such a fantastic insight into our bizarre little brains, especially the bizarre brains of ancient people. Today we're going to follow a trail of breadcrumbs that span the Mediterranean. Is this disk truly unique or can other artifacts give us clues to its purpose? Let's get into it. Okay, there's one thing we have to settle first. Is this a genuine artifact or is it a forgery? Is it a fake? Is it a hoax? Is it pulling the wool over our eyes? The disk itself has not been directly dated. It could be directly dated using like thermoluminescence dating or something like that, which would tell us when the clay was last fired, but at the minute that has not been done. However, that is probably not necessary to be honest. The hoax argument goes like this. When the disk was discovered in Phaistos in 1908, another artifact, another site was kind of grabbing all the headlines. You've certainly heard of it, Knossos. It was excavated by a British chap called Arthur Evans. You can see these incredible old photos of the excavations here. Absolutely fantastic to unearth such a thing, isn't it? Knossos truly is one of Europe's great archaeological treasures. Incredible frescoes have been found, brilliant sculptures, certainly connected to some religious ideas around bulls, I think. The bull really seemed to mean a lot to the Minoans. It's everything an archaeologist could dream of discovering. So according to this idea, Luigi is basically jealous that Knossos and Arthur Evans are getting all the headlines. So he creates this disk, this enigmatic disk, to get back some of the attention. Doesn't sound implausible. That's not implausible. People do do things like that. But just a couple of things that really don't make sense of it was a forgery. The first, perhaps the least significant of all, Luigi didn't say he discovered it. He claims one of the local workers did, a Zacharias Eliakis. I believe that's him in the far right of this photo. So if he was in it for the glory, maybe he would have said he excavated it himself. But who knows, right? Maybe he's just making it sound plausible. Much more importantly though, one of the symbols on the disk was later found on other objects. Check this out. This comb-like symbol appears twice on side A of the disk. It's kind of got, yeah, a comb is probably a good enough word for it. I don't know if it actually is a comb though. Maybe it's some sort of like temple or palace layout. Who knows? Who knows what it represents? But in the 1960s, a bowl was excavated at Phaistos that also contained this symbol. Then in the 1970s, a seal was found with this comb on it too. So even though the disk isn't directly dated, and it would be great if it was, could it really be that Luigi could have predicted that these signs would be discovered on two artifacts, you know, 50, 60 years later? Luigi died in 1937. He can't have had anything to do with these. He couldn't have been involved in any way. And you know, this would mean that the other archaeologists 50, 60 years later would be excavating these items to attempt to prove Luigi right. But there's like, there's no motive here. There's no money and there's no one, no one gets rich from, from finding a Minoan seal. So logically with the, with the symbols being found, I think it can't really be a hoax. The symbol isn't so simple that it's just coincidence, I think. 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So, whoever made it went to the trouble of making 45 distinct stamps to create the disc, and yet, this is the only example of this script we have. Isn't that really odd? You would think, if you were printing something and, and using stamps, you were doing that because you wanted to make a lot of text, not just one. Strange, strange. This is especially odd because, at the time the Five Stars disc was made, writing was really taking off in Crete. There's some debate as to the age of the disc, but sometime between 1850 to 1400 BCE, and in that time period, across those centuries, there were, there were three scripts that had been developed on Crete. The first is Linear A. In fact, a Linear A tablet was found in the same room as the Five Stars disc. You can see it here. There's even a ring with a spiral Linear A inscription. That's kind of Five Stars disc-y, you know, the writing arranged in a spiral. We haven't deciphered Linear A, but it's believed that the script evolved into Linear B sometime around 1450 BCE, so this would have been towards, you know, the youngest date that the Five Stars disc could be. Linear B can be read, and it was used to record an early form of Greek. We have lots of examples of these scripts. I think archaeologists found about 1,400 tablets or inscriptions of Linear A, and about 6,000 examples of Linear B. So, at least some members of this society are truly literate, and they're, they're writing down a lot. A third script called Cretan Hieroglyphics also existed at this time. Cretan Hieroglyphics are also not deciphered. We have a couple of hundred examples of these, as far as I'm aware, and these are, these are probably, you know, based on contact with Egypt, and their Hieroglyphic script probably inspired this form of writing. It's just a really incredible, it's just a really incredible moment in human history. Writing was really taking off in a big way. You can't help but wonder, were the people alive at that time aware of the revolution that they were living in? Did they ever think that someone writing in Linear A ever stopped to think, like, oh, my granddad couldn't do this? Or did a grandfather or grandmother ever wonder what their, their grandkids were doing? Yeah, it's kind of interesting, isn't it? At some point, someone had to be the first. Anyway, anyway, anyway. It's very odd that we have so many examples of this other form of writing, and yet we only have one example of the Phaistos Disc script, even though it was made by printing, by stamping, which you would, you would think lent itself to mass production. Yeah, it's very odd, very odd. Some scholars have even wondered whether the Phaistos Disc originated from Crete at all because of this. Maybe it came from Anatolia, but if it was produced elsewhere, we don't have an idea where. We don't have, really, any great evidence to support that. There is one artifact that's really similar to the Phaistos Disc, though, and it definitely doesn't come from Greece. So there's one artifact when I was learning all about the Phaistos Disc that seems so, so similar to it, doesn't it? So, so similar. This is the lead plaque of Magliano. As you can see, again, it's a two-sided spiral inscription. It's so similar that those that argue that the Phaistos Disc was a hoax say that this was the inspiration behind it because it was found about 20 years before the Phaistos Disc in 1882. This one wasn't found in Crete, though. It was found in Magliano in Tuscany, and the text is Etruscan. The Etruscans, such a fascinating civilization. They lived in what is now Tuscany, primarily. That's where this Italian region of Tuscany gets its name from. They created beautiful art. I especially love their reclining sarcophaguses. Look at that. How fantastic is that? What a chill way to be remembered. You can put me chilling on my grave. Of course, like all Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations, they were, you know, really trading across the Mediterranean. They influenced Italian and later Roman civilization a lot. It's even possible that the name Rome itself comes from the Etruscan language, perhaps from the Etruscan word ruma, which means teat. It could be a reference to Rome's mythical founding, or perhaps the shape of the famous Roman hills. Who knows? Who knows? They were a distinct political entity until about the 4th century BCE, when they were folded into the Roman Republic. Crucially for this story, though, we can read their writing. The Etruscan alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet, and we even have a few bilingual texts. This is the Purgi tablets, which have Etruscan and Phoenician on them. Very cool stuff. I definitely said the name wrong. So we can read Etruscan. Here's where it gets slightly frustrating though. We can read it, but we don't always know what it's saying. Etruscan was not a Proto-Indo-European language. It seems like it was a holdover from the Neolithic period, perhaps. Maybe like the Basque language. As a result, we haven't been able to work out what every word means, but we have worked out some. The plaque of Maglione seems to be some sort of offering or religious text. It's dedicated to the Etruscan god Maris the Maker, and to some ancestors, Thaner, Callus, Suri, and Tinin. There also seems to be something about priests making offerings on behalf of the Marina family. I think that's basically all we can get from it, or at least most of what we can get from this tablet. It's certainly a religious text though, in some form. Certainly a religious text. There's apparently a lot of repetition of the word dedicated and, you know, religious stuff. It's a religious thing. It does remind me of the Five Stars Disc a lot. The Five Stars Disc does also seemingly repeat phrases, so some argue that this is also a sign that this is perhaps a prayer, a dedication, you know, something you're going to over and over again. Something like that. Now, another problem is that the Five Stars Disc is 1,000 years older than this plaque of Maglione. Magliano. Magliano. The plaque of Magliano is 1,000 years younger than the Five Stars Disc. But, you know, nevertheless, this is the most similar object to it that we've perhaps found, and it's a religious text, so perhaps that's a clue. That could be a clue, right? There was another civilization though which the Minoans were in frequent contact with, which perhaps also holds a clue. Tantalizing clue. The palace at Five Stars and the palaces across Crete that were made during this Minoan time period, during this Bronze Age, were almost certainly constructed because they had some form of control or monopoly of trade that was going on, and the luxury resources that came with that. At this time, trade really was booming all across the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean, and there was one civilization that was at the heart of it all. Egypt. Egypt's called the Minoans in Crete Keftiu, and we see evidence of their contact all over the place. So, these are paintings on the wall of a tomb belonging to an Egyptian vizier named Rechmire. Rechmire. Rechmire. He was vizier under Thutmose III and Amenhotep II. A couple of paintings in his tomb are said to show people from Keftiu bringing goods. Looks like huge copper ingots, a container of some kind, maybe oil or wine, something like that. These are the ancient Minoans as the Egyptians saw them. Isn't that fascinating? Aren't the details on their clothes brilliant? All the elaborate embroidery on their skirts. I don't know any other word to say it. And are they wearing fancy socks? I highly approve if they are. There's another Egyptian place called Tell el Daba, which in ancient times, which also you might have heard by the name Avaris. Here, bull jumping frescoes were found on the wall of a palace, which are similar to those bull jumping scenes we saw earlier from Knossos. Archaeologists believe Minoan artists were brought to the palace to jazz it up, to have some foreign decoration, some fancy foreign decoration. And this doesn't even include all the Egyptian artifacts that are found on Crete too. Statues of viziers, of statues of pharaohs, all sorts of stuff, all sorts of stuff. They were probably trading gold. That's probably where the Minoans got a lot of their gold from, which they were turning into beautiful jewelry. Again, look, here's another bull leaping scene. They loved that so much. Another elaborate bull, very delicate jewelry. Maybe all this trade and contact inspired the Phaistos disc. So this circular board is called Mehen, and it's from ancient Egypt. Seems the aim of the game was to go from the outside to the center, but we're not 100% sure how it was played. What we do think we know though, is that this game had its origins in the religion of ancient Egypt. Mehen was a serpent god who lived on Ra's barge that he used to fly through the sky. It seems he was a guide, but he also wrapped Ra in his coils to protect him from evil. You can see him in this Egyptian artwork, it's very cool. According to this paper I read, the Egyptians had this sort of, these ritual practices, we're not really sure what they are, but they're referring to things like the secrets of Mehen. There's something going on with Mehen that is shrouded in secrecy, maybe secret rituals. There seems to be this idea in Egyptian religion that Mehen controlled a realm of the underworld, which contained nine circular roads, four of which were made of fire, which Mehen's barge sailed around and around on for millions of years. The goal of the deceased was apparently to make it to Ra in the center of these nine worlds, and to succeed in doing that, maybe they seemed the dead needed to know the names of these roads. That's what we think is going on. I don't know that we know the names of these roads now. I couldn't find that answer, I'm not saying no one does, but I couldn't find that. Maybe they are still shrouded in secrecy. It seems like the ancient Egyptians did have this idea that the dead were playing games with the gods to decide their final resting place in this realm. So that's, you know, basically maybe how the Mehen, the god, became connected with this board game when you're traveling around the world. Could these board games have inspired the Phaistos disk? We're not totally sure. At Minoan cemeteries there are also these circular stone tablets, some of them perhaps offering tables, you know, maybe the very big ones are offering tables, but maybe smaller ones are connected to this sort of game of death that they learned from Egypt. It's a possibility. These civilizations were in frequent, frequent contact. The only curious thing is that the game of Mehen seems to have sort of died out, stopped being played around the end of the Old Kingdom, which would mean they're about 500 years older than the Phaistos disk. But who knows if this idea lived on in Crete, that's a possibility. Some archaeologists have wondered if the Phaistos disk was like this, uh, maybe kind of like Mehen like game that connected to death, that perhaps it is a votive offering, which means that maybe this is not really writing on the Phaistos disk. It's maybe just meant to look like writing, right? Votive offerings are these kind of, you know, representations of real things for the dead, but they're not really the real thing. They're kind of deliberate fakes that the deceased could take with them, you know, you could give them to the deceased without worrying that you're giving away something valuable, which if true might be a shame because that would mean that this writing that we're so enamored by doesn't mean anything. It's just meant to look like writing. It's just meant to be hieroglyphs, which would be anticlimactic. So I was wondering, do these signs appear anywhere else? And, you know, what have been our attempts to decipher it? Some of the characters on the disk do seem to match other artifacts. This here is the Archelokori axe. I know I'm saying all these names wrong. It's a Minoan labrys or ritual axe. It's a ritual axe, a ritual item, seemingly connected to female goddesses. Both this axe and the Phaistos disk kind of have this branch character on them. They both have this kind of Y symbol and they both have a chap with pointy hair, which I was wondering to me, does this bear a passing resemblance to these drawings of sea people, these inscriptions of sea people, which apparently show philistines? That's interesting. Are these the sea people on the Phaistos disk? I'm not sure if that's relevant, but it stood out to me. Some argue that the 21 of the signs on the Phaistos disk are also pretty similar to Linear A, and some are definitely very similar. For example, this wavy line here, that's so similar. That's basically identical to what seems to be on Linear A. Others, sign 15, this matic, this axe kind of thing, this also is a symbol in Linear A. Others are perhaps more of a leap, like this. This is sign 30 on the disk. The ram, is that really similar to this Linear A symbol? That seems like more of a leap, more of a leap to me, but I'm no linguist. They could be entirely correct. Another clue that the Phaistos disk isn't just a votive offering that these words actually mean something, is that there seems to be grammatical structure here, particularly prefixes and suffixes. Take a look at this. So, signs 45 and 7 appear next to each other five times, and in four of those times, they're surrounded by other signs, like 27, the hide, or the shield, sign 12. It's like 45 and 7 are the of this word, and the others are prefixes and suffixes. You see it again, 13 and 1, the pedestrian and the club are found together five times, again seemingly with different prefixes and suffixes. So it does seem like it's truly attempting to say something. It seems like there's grammar here, actual grammar, and there have certainly been plenty of attempts to decipher it, plenty of attempts. I can't list them all, I can't list them all, but there are some interesting ones. An early attempt was in 1911 by a George Hempel, who believed it was Ionic Greek, and said something like this, he believed he translated it, Lo, Sypho, the prophetess, dedicated spoils from a spoiler of the prophetess. Zeusgardas, in silence, put aside the most dainty portions of the still unroasted animal. Athena, Minerva, be gracious, silence, the victims have been put to death, silence. Very dramatic reading. I don't know if the Minoans believed in the classical Greek gods, that's an interesting one. Anyone who knows about religion feel free to comment. A more modern attempt by Dr Gareth Owens, who also studies the Minoan language, believed it to be a prayer to the mother goddess. His starting point seems to be the similarity between the signs on the Phaistos disc and signs in Linear A, and then you know, maybe can we get some sounds from it. Seems like a very logical place to start. He even has a TEDx video where you can hear them reading it out, and what they believe it sounded like in the Minoan language. My understanding is though, there is one significant problem. We have no way of checking who's right. Unlike with Linear A, and B, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and all of these things where we have thousands of examples to check against, the disc is still a one-on-one item. There is only one Phaistos disc. Despite the fact that it was produced by society undergoing a literary revolution, despite the fact that there are similar artifacts across the Mediterranean, despite the fact it shares a few symbols with other Minoan artifacts, it remains truly unique. There's nothing like it. It's truly enigmatic, truly unique, and until that changes, we're in the dark. We have no way of knowing who's right. We have no way to test it. The intentions and the words of our Bronze Age ancestors still remain a mystery. What is it? I hope it's a board game you play when you die. That's my hope. Thank you for watching.