Phaistos Disc | Hacker News Reader

Phaistos Disc

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44 pointscookingoils35 comments

Imagine you are a child, drawing random images out of your imagination. Fast forward thousand years and the [clay disc|hard drive] you were working on is found by archaeologists and they derive your entire culture from the random mohawk face you thought up.

I thought the same exact thing. Cookie symbol? A ghost. The imagery looks modern, and playful.

I find the theory that it is a game especially intriguing. In ancient times, games were used as divination methods, a way to know the will of the gods [1]. The game theory explains many things, such as the uniqueness of the symbols and the spiral pattern.

Board games, like language, music, and religion, have been created in every culture [2] [3], but physical evidence is very scarce. Written evidence is even more lacking. There are games we know of, but know very little of how they were played or used (e.g.: Senet) [4]. Could the Phaistos disc be a rare piece of physical evidence?

An entire book has been written about the Phaistos disk as board game [5]. I can't speak to the specific theories/guesses made in the book, but the notion that the disc is a game seems very plausible to this casual observer.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Games-Gods-Ancient-Systems/dp/...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2688609-ancient-board-ga...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Board-Table-Games-Many-Civilizations/...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet#Gameplay

[5] http://phaistosgame.com/

There are also a lot of old boards found by archaeologists which are assumed to be game boards but might have instead (or also) been counting boards (abacuses) used for performing calculations.

I’m fairly convinced (though I’m not an expert and it’s hard to be sure about ancient artifacts without documentary corroboration) that backgammon, mancala, and chess boards were originally used as calculation tools. Maybe senet too.

For those interested in learning more about the disc, I would recommend The Phaistos Disk: An Account of its Unsolved Mystery by Thomas Balistier. It does a good job of explaining the various explanations of the disc and it’s history.

I think it is a contract of some sort. I think these are personal seals, each group representing an individual. This might be some sort of guild or religious group where members were identified with a series of random symbols, akin to a social insurance or military service number.

Maybe people took home smaller representations so that in the future they could be identified as having been part of the group. If that is the case, this cannot be deciphered any more than one might decipher a list of phone numbers.

I dunno, a list of phone numbers could tell you quite a bit. Are they roman numerals or arab? How many digits? Are they standard length sequences or variable? Are there any repeating patterns in the numeric sequences or groupings?

Honestly, my biggest question is: Why did this get its own Unicode block? It's weird that symbols found on literally one object in history have gotten their own unique Unicode assignments.

Because the archeologists need these glyphs in their papers.

Why not a vector image for super niches like these?

Prob because a vector image would have visual content but no semantic content. That is to say, no identity (a number), no collation (ordering), no abstract representation ("PHAISTOS_PUNK_WITH_LONG_NOSE_AND_MOHAWK")[0].

Also if you already had unicode machiinery, which you will if you're writing a paper, you'd now need a 2nd mechanism for rendering; the SVG you mentioned.

Unicode is meant to be universal so it makes sense to me.

[0] which is indeed on the disk, although the minoans likely didn't call it that.

Do the potential users of that codepage know to use it?

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. it's unicode so AFAIU codepages don't apply. Am I misreading you?

Sorry, I misused "codepage" but meant the unicode block that includes these characters.

My question is whether, considering these glyphs were included in Unicode for the purpose of usage as you described, those who would use it be technically sophisticated enough to actually do so?

i.e. we built it, but will they come?

If I gave the impression I was a unicode expert, that was a mistake. I have only done some reading.

But from that limited position, such characters are just numbers in the unicode spec.

If the appropriate font is installed on the document creators' and document readers' machines, it will render just like any other character such as the unicode you're reading here. If the font isn't present you'll probably get the number printed \u12345 or something similar.

But I am not an expert and if one wants to chime in here, please do.

What semantic content is conveyed by assigning Unicode codepoints, though? The article says it's not even clear that it's a script. How can you make out numbers, or ordering, or meaning?

Are there proposals to create a Unicode block for, say, the Voynich Manuscript? There's been much more written about that than this disc.

Well, as I described here. Whatever semantic content we assign to it. I think I see your point - you mean the semantics of the script's creators? Yes, good point, and no not that cos we don't know anything about what they meant, nor likely ever will.

Any semantics we assign to it are a number (unicode value), possible collation (ordering), and the name (possibly other stuff, I don't know). So if we found more phaistos disks with punky-mohawk-guy on that, and we decided they were intended by the original creators to mean the same 'character' on all disks, all those glyphs would get the same unicode character. Scholars could then index them by the same 'character', look for relationsips between those characters they've established are the same.

More concretely, what a letter is in english doesn't link much to how it looks. For example, the uppercase letters here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gebrochene_Schriften.png are all english but to my eyes, each taken individually, are grotesques and some (like the capital 'H' in Textur font), are illegible to me. Literally I would not guess what letter it is. Yet they're all your common or garden alphabetical letters.

So the semantics are, whatever the 'H' looks like, we know what it is, how to sort with it, where to find it in an (english) dictionary, etc.

HTH (and IANAExpert)

The Proposal for encoding the Phaistos Disc characters[1] lists the motivation behind including it (and rebutes some counter arguments). Principally, lots of publications discussing the Phaistos Disc would use it:

> Phaistos Disc characters, whether syllables, or letters, or board-game dingbats, have historical and cultural significance, as attested in the large number of publications dealing with it. As noted above, the Wikipedia has articles about the Phaistos Disc in ten languages. The 30+ documents listed in the bibliography in this proposal are by no means the only documents printed which deal with the Phaistos Disc characters. The English Wikipedia article gives Phaistos Disc characters inline in text as well as in tables (Figure 8). Other documents exist which present the Phaistos Disc characters either inline (Figure 8) or in tables (Figures 1, 2, 5, 6, 7). It is true that the image of the Phaistos Disc itself is easy to represent with simple drawing (see Figure 3) but the discussion of its characters inline in Latin text is not.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06095-n3066-phaistos.pdf

Thanks! I was poking around trying to figure it out, but did not find this.

The undeciphered Linear A [0], related to the Phaistos disc, as well as many other languages have their own Unicode block [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_block

I've seen it in Heraklion a week ago it was really interesting to see. We also speculated a lot about it with my girlfriend :)

My ideas were

- it's a showcase of different symbols in the workshop, but why repeat them then?

- a diary, a plan, a calendar

- random doodling :)

But it's definitely one of the oldest compact discs out there.

That’s cool. I was there two days ago. Really amazing to see it in person just for the sense of scale. It feels like it was made for just one or two people to hold.

Wow, I was thinking along the same lines. I thought it could be a teaching tool. Calendar or some sort of template also seems plausible.

aand of course its symbols are in unicode already. I've heard that not every modern bengali inscription could be represented in unicode.

Looks like a good game, all you need are some dice and a couple of counters.

And rules

Apparently, it's quite solved atm (the last attempt mentioned)? They're missing terms, but it's basically a hymn to a goddess, or so this specialist says:

https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2018/02/07/gareth-owens-50...

This is one of the very few real archaeological oddities: Phaistos Disk, Antikythera Mechanism, Lenses of Gottland, maybe those jade funereal suits from China that really seem to indicate "lost technologies" really existed, and maybe if they'd not been lost, things would have turned out differently.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat

Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

You should also mention the Pylos Combat Agate [1]. For those who haven’t seen this before, if you open the wikipedia link on a cell phone, the image is already higher than life size. Watch and be amazed. This incredibly detailed work of art/ jewelry was created 200 years before the reign of Ramses II. Whatever technology people had at the time that allowed them to make this, it died with the Bronze Age Collapse (or before), and it took people one thousand years to get to the same level of sophistication.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pylos_Combat_Agate

It looks hastily made, I like the theory that it’s a prayer or hymn. A congregation would needs hundreds of these made whenever you had a new hymn or prayer. You have to rotate it to read it, so presumably, as you are reciting the prayer or the song, you rotate it to follow along.

Doesn't that Phaistos disc's symbols look awfully like what a modern (Western, at least) young person, just playing, would end up with?

Chocolate chip cookie symbol? Ghost symbol? And so on?

If it's indeed really old, how very interesting.

Cookie is interpreted as a shield, ghost as an ox skin.

Really, getting into the mindset of people at the eve of civilization helps.

>Doesn't that Phaistos disc's symbols look awfully like what a modern (Western, at least) young person, just playing, would end up with?

Only in the sense that countless other picture based scripts (e.g. in Egypt, Latin America, and so on), look like that...

>If it's indeed really old

This is not under dispute by any archeologist.

Reminds me of Antikythera mechanism

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