Phaistos Disc

Luigi Pernier's report dates the find to the evening of July 3, 1908. His Italian mission was digging a building just northeast of the palace at Phaistos, in southern Crete. The disc lay in a narrow room with no doorway, reachable only from above, about 55 centimeters over the bedrock floor. It stood on its edge, tilted north, in dark earth mixed with ash, charcoal, broken pottery, and a few cattle bones, some of them burned. A few centimeters to the southeast lay a broken clay tablet in Linear A, the Minoan script that is also still unread. Pernier thought both had fallen from an upper floor.

The archaeologist Giorgia Baldacci notes that the disc turned up during an evening inspection by the local foreman, outside the regular digging, in a layer disturbed in Hellenistic times. The Heraklion Archaeological Museum dates the disc to about 1700 to 1650 BC. Baldacci, drawing on new fieldwork at the findspot in 2013 and 2015 and on pottery from the site, puts it nearer 1750 BC.

The signs

The signs were pressed into the wet clay with small stamps before the disc was fired. The museum counts 241 of them; Baldacci and others count 242. They come from 45 different stamps, which Baldacci thinks were probably metal. The pictures include people, birds, plants, and ships. Incised lines divide them into 61 groups, and on each side a short line with five dots marks where the text starts. The museum reads the spiral from the rim toward the center.

Because each stamp was used again and again, the disc is often described as an early form of movable type. Nature introduced a 2008 essay on the disc with the line "Believed to be the world's first printed document." In 2008, the Unicode standard added the 45 signs, along with a small oblique stroke that appears under some of them.

Reading it

The museum's own description says that experts "have not yet reached a definitive conclusion on the contents of the inscription." Some groups of signs repeat like a refrain, which the museum calls the strongest evidence that the text is a hymn or an incantation. How the disc relates to Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphic, and Linear B is also unsettled.

Proposed readings have turned the text into Greek, Luwian, Semitic, Basque, Chinese, and Polynesian, among others. In 2014, the linguist Gareth Owens presented a reading at a TEDx talk in Heraklion that made the disc a prayer to a mother goddess. Thomas Palaima of the University of Texas answered with a line Elizabeth Barber wrote in 1974: with only 241 signs known, there is "not enough statistical information" for anyone to prove a decipherment, "but by the same token there is not enough for anyone else to disprove it." Brent Davis of the University of Melbourne called the corpus "far too small to be deciphered in any reliable way."

Is it genuine?

In the July/August 2008 issue of Minerva, its editor, Jerome Eisenberg, argued that Pernier made the disc and planted it to rival Arthur Evans at Knossos and Federico Halbherr at Gortyna. Eisenberg pointed to the cleanly cut edge and to the firing. He noted that Minoan clay tablets were baked only by accident, in the fires that destroyed the palaces, while the disc was fired on purpose. He acknowledged that the article was not peer reviewed. In a follow-up, he printed a note from Palaima: "I think it is likely that the disc is a forgery."

Baldacci's 2021 account makes the case the other way. A bowl found at Phaistos in 1965 carries a potter's mark that is nearly identical to sign 21, the "comb." A sealing found in 1955 under the later palace carries a very similar sign. A study of stamped Phaistos pottery found close matches for six of the disc's signs. Most of that pottery came out of the ground between 1950 and 1966. A forger working in 1908 could not have copied these. The museum presents the disc as a genuine Minoan object.

Eisenberg wrote that only a thermoluminescence test could settle the question and that his requests to have one run had failed. In 2007, answering his request to examine it, the museum's director told him the disc "because of its uniqueness is considered as non movable."

The disc is in Gallery V, case 51, according to the museum's online catalog. From April 28 to October 31, 2026, the museum is open 8am to 8pm, except Wednesdays, when it opens at 1pm. The last entry is 20 minutes before closing. Hours from November 1 are set separately and posted on the museum's website.

Admission is €20. Tickets are sold at the museum and online at hhticket.gr, which the Ministry of Culture names as the only official site, and a ticket is valid only for its booked day and time slot. Entry is free on October 28, when the museum closes at 3pm, and on the 1st and 3rd Sundays of each month from November through March.