The heyday of the first great civilization in Europe, the Cretan-Minoan, falls on 1900-1450 BC. This civilization was called palace civilization, since its main centers were not cities, but palaces - complex multi-storey buildings, with many rooms, which played the role of political and economic centers.
Throughout the island of Crete, archaeologists have identified and excavated five large palace complexes: Knossos, Festus, Malia, Zakros and Kydonia. There was a small palace of local importance in Gurnia.
The palace in Malia, as the legends tell, was built around 1900 BC by the brother of the famous king Minos - Sarpedon. This third largest Minoan palace is located on the north coast of Crete, close to the sea, on the road connecting the east and central parts of the island.
Minoan palace in Malia
In the central courtyard of this huge structure, a mysterious circular slab with a diameter of 90 centimeters and a thickness of 36 centimeters is preserved. It is built into the floor of a small terrace, slightly raised above the level of the courtyard. Along the entire circumference of the disc, there are 33 neat round recesses of the same size, resembling cups.
The 34th cup is slightly larger and is cut into the surface of the protrusion extending beyond the circumference of the disc. This ledge is oriented strictly to the south. There is also a cup-shaped depression in the very center of the disc. It is noticeably larger than all the others - its diameter is 15 centimeters, and its edges are surrounded by a low side and a concentric circle.
This strange monolith, dating from 1900-1750 BC, has been a mystery to scientists since its discovery in 1926 by French archaeologists. What is this device? For what purpose was it created? What is its purpose?
Stone disc from Malia
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The most curious thing is that several similar devices have been found in Crete, and the disc from Malia is the most monumental of them. Common to all of these devices is the presence of round recesses cut into the surface of the stone slabs and usually arranged in a circle or oval. Some of these slabs also have a central (larger) depression and all have one depression that differs from the others in size and location.
In some cases, the stone slab is rectangular in shape, with indentations along the perimeter, in others - in several parallel rows. In the latter version, there are much more depressions - sometimes up to a hundred or more, and the appearance of the slabs themselves differs sharply from the others, while the round and rectangular slabs have the same characteristics (the number of depressions, the presence or absence of a central depression).
Recessed slab from Malia
Finally, several slabs are known with recesses arranged in a spiral or without any system scattered over the surface of the stone.
The function of these slabs remains a mystery. Depending on what this or that researcher tried to see in them, they were given certain definitions, but all these definitions add little to the understanding of the problem. The most popular hypothesis is that the disk from Malia and other finds in Crete should be considered an analogue of kernos.
An ancient Greek ceramic vessel of a round shape with cups on a rim was called kernos. Such vessels are believed to have been used for ritual purposes. Along with this, in the Alps, Scandinavia, Scotland and a number of other regions of Europe, in the complexes of petroglyphs, there are so-called cup-shaped signs - even depressions in the stone, sometimes surrounded by concentric circles.
Kernos
The circles can be separated by radial lines or have a groove extending from the center. Often, cup-shaped marks are located around a central depression, which is always larger.
In composition, all this is very similar to the disc from Malia, however, each individual cup-shaped sign is, in essence, just a shallow hole in the stone, while the depressions on the disc from Malia are worked out extremely carefully and really resemble the ancient Greek kernos. It is logical to assume that the function of this and other similar Cretan devices was also ritual.
Back in 1928, a not unreasonable hypothesis was expressed that the disc from Malia was intended for the rite of panspermia. This rite, whose roots go back to the prehistoric period, consisted in the offering of various fruits as a gift to the gods and the dead.
Ancient Greek kernos served precisely this purpose: each of its many small cups located in a circle was filled with various fruits, wine and oil, and a lamp was placed in the central recess.
According to another, no less popular version, discs and plates with grooves were used for board games. True, the authors of various hypotheses differ in the definition of these games: according to some, it was the so-called navmachia - "sea battle", and according to others - something like roulette, in which the chips were beans or small pebbles.
The most interesting and unexpected hypothesis related to the mystery of the disk from Malia was put forward in 1983 by the American scientist Charles Herberger, who spent many years studying the Minoan calendar system. In his opinion, the disk from Malia is a lunisolar calendar.
At the heart of any lunisolar calendar is the cyclic movement of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun. The years in the lunisolar calendar are counted according to the Sun, and months according to the Moon.
The lunar (synodic) month is the period of the full cycle of the phases of the moon between two new moons. Its duration averages 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes, but in reality the duration of the synodic month differs from the average within 13 hours.
A solar (tropical) year is a period of a complete cycle of the Earth's movement around the Sun, accompanied by a change in all four seasons. Its duration is 365.2422 days, or 12.36827 synodic months.
The main task of the lunisolar calendar is to coordinate the lunar and solar time counting. In order for the average length of a calendar year to correspond to a solar year, a periodic system for inserting the thirteenth lunar month is necessary. The year of thirteen months in the lunisolar calendar is called embolismic.
The system of rules for introducing embolismic years into the calendar since ancient times was determined by the 3/8 cycle, where 8 is the number of years in the calendar cycle, and 3 is the number of embolismic years in this cycle. The calendar eight-year cycle, or "octaetheride", was used in ancient Babylon, Greece and other countries. In this cycle, 8 solar years correspond to 99 synodic months.
The Malian disc contains 33 small cups, making the 8-year cycle symmetrically divided into 99 synodic months. The 34th cup, due to its larger size, appears to represent the thirteenth, additional month.
Thus, using a system of markers and moving them from hole to hole, it was possible to have a sufficiently accurate lunisolar calendar and to start the agricultural season at the same time every year. This kind of calendar, even if it was created empirically, is a wonderful innovation for the time of 4000 years ago.