There are many mysteries and secrets associated with world archeology. And not always these mysteries lie on the surface and are as huge as the Egyptian pyramids. Sometimes they easily fit and; I am in the hands of a man, but many centuries and millennia are hidden in the earth. Until archaeologists bring them out into the light of day.
Another working day, July 3, 1908, of the Italian expedition, excavating the ruins of the royal palace in Festus, on the island of Crete, was coming to an end when the archaeologist L. Pernier, who was clearing one of the ancillary rooms of the palace, discovered a small disc made of well-baked clay.
Let's learn more about this disc too …
The surface of the object taken from the ground was covered on both sides with hitherto unknown letters. The ribbon of the calligraphically executed drawing marks was twisted into two tight spirals. Inside the inscriptions, on both sides, groups of characters were distinguished, enclosed in rectangular cell fields. It could be seen that the ancient calligrapher-printer used a technique that anticipated book printing. Each sign was imprinted with a specially cut miniature seal. The set of stamps was undoubtedly made in advance and was hardly intended to reproduce a single small text.
According to archaeological data, the Phaistos disc should have been dated to about 1600 BC. e. - the period of formation of the Cretan-Minoan civilization. For a long time, the question of the place of manufacture of the ceramic disc remained open - was it made on the island of Crete or was it brought here by someone. But during excavations in the thirties of the last century, a cave sanctuary in Arkohor (Central Crete), a cult copper ax with an engraved inscription was found, on which signs from the Phaistos disc were encountered.
In addition, as the study of other archaeological finds has shown, the Cretan pottery masters, long before the manufacture of the Phaistos disc, knew the technique of applying images to the surface of a clay object before firing images imprinted with specially made matrices.
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The brevity of the Phaistos disc - there are 45 types of different signs in it, a total of 241 signs - does not allow making far-reaching conclusions based on its statistical analysis. However, it is still possible to find out, in principle, what this writing system was. The number of characters on the disc is too large for the alphabet, but at the same time too few for hieroglyphic writing, that is, verbal and syllabic, where the characters are in the hundreds. Therefore, scientists have defined the writing of the Phaistos disc as syllabic.
HOW VENTRIS READ WHAT EVANS FOUND
Note that the first samples of such a so-called linear writing were discovered by the famous English archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1900 during excavations of another large Cretan city of Knossos. In total, Evans found there samples of three, clearly related types of Minoan writing. The first of them included signs that, like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, had a pictorial character and depicted various specific objects. Evans called it Cretan hieroglyphics. Two other types of writing of the ancient Cretans with signs of generalized outlines, for the most part clearly lost direct resemblance to their pictorial prototypes, received the names of Linear A and Linear B.
Attempts to decipher the Cretan letters began with their discovery, but for a long time they were unsuccessful. Just before World War II, a very young British researcher Michael Ventris (1922-1956) began work on deciphering Linear B, and was destined to solve this most difficult problem. The path to its success was largely paved by the works of American scientists - Alice Kober and Emetta Bonetta.
Success came to Ventris in 1952, when, using the results of a formal analysis of the inscriptions made by Kober, he was able to develop much deeper her observations about the presence of grammatical endings in the language under study and was able to draw up a special coordinate grid reflecting their alternation. Now it remained to find out which of the ancient languages could fit into the grid he received.
For many years, Ventris thought that the language of the Linear B tablets should be Etruscan, because the language of the Etruscans, the ancient inhabitants of Italy, judging by many data, is connected by its origin with the Aegean world. In any case, he did not admit the idea that it could be Greek. At one time, following the theory of his compatriot Evans, Ventris even wrote: "The hypothesis that the Minoan language could turn out to be Greek, of course, is based on a clear disregard for historical probability."
However, the Etruscan language grammatically did not fit the Ventris grid in any way. And then the researcher decided, just in case, for the sake of experiment, to check how much Greek would approach her. The result was amazing: the Greek language came up perfectly. The decoding of Linear B by Michael Ventris made it possible not only to read the ancient Greek texts of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. e., but also created the basis for a fruitful study of other monuments of the Aegean writing of the pre-Greek period, which include the writing of the Phaistos disc.
Attempt after Attempt
Thanks to the achievements of Ventris, it was really possible to read the overwhelming majority of the inscriptions made with Linear A, many of whose characters coincide with those of Linear B. With the writing of the Phaistos disc, everything is much more complicated. Success can only be called partial. Moreover, not only professional linguists, but also numerous amateurs and enthusiasts are struggling to decipher it.
The Russian historian and linguist A. A. Molchanov came closest to uncovering the mystery of the mysterious inscription on the disc. At one time, the journal "Science and Life" already talked about his works (see No. 2, 1983), and in the most complete form they are set out in his book "Envoys of Perished Civilizations (Letters of the Ancient Aegeis)" (M., " Science ", 1992).
So, the linguist A. Molchanov, with the care and thoroughness of a true professional, carried out his analysis of the text and came to the conclusion that the so-called sign 02 - a human head with a rooster's comb - conveys a mixed image of a man and a rooster - an animal that has been revered on the island of Crete as an attribute since ancient times supreme solar deity.
According to the ancient mythological and historical tradition, the ancient Cretan rulers, the descendants of King Minos, raised their family to the sun god and the cock served as their ancestral emblem. The fact that a sacred dynastic symbol served as the prototype for sign 02 allowed Molchanov to consider it a determinative, in other words, a determinant of the names of the Minoan rulers. In the text, this sign is accompanied by 19 words. Therefore, it lists the names of 19 Minoan rulers.
Journalist Vladimir Mikhailov, after many years of work on decrypting the disk, found what he believes to be the key to the secret. In his opinion, the disc reproduces the prayers that Cretan grain growers sang during the cultivation of the fields and the harvest. On the front side of the disc there is supposedly a prayer for the “revival of the spirit of bread”.
However, the most original interpretation of the text of the Phaistos disc was offered by the notorious Gennady Grinevich, a geologist by profession. Considering the inscriptions of the Phaistos disc to be similar to the Slavic writing of the "devil and cut" type, he deciphers the front side of the disc as follows:
“The sorrows of the past cannot be counted, but the sorrows of the present are bitter. In a new place, you will feel them. Together. What else did God send us? A place in the world of God. Do not count past strife. Place that God wished you, surround with close rows. Protect it day and night. Not a place - will. Her children are still alive, knowing whose they are in this world. " The text on the reverse side: “We will live again, there will be worship of God, everything will be in the past - we will forget who we are. There are children - there are bonds - we will forget who we are. What to count, god. Rysiyuniya enchants the eyes. You cannot get away from it, you cannot be cured of it. More than once it will be, we will hear: whose will you be, trotters, what honors for you, helmets in curls, talk about you? Do not eat yet, we will be her."
When decrypting, A. A. Molchanov applied combinatorial analysis. First of all, he revealed on the disk the personal names of the rulers, and then - toponyms, that is, the names of the Cretan cities. Having successfully solved this problem, the researcher was able to build a so-called artificial bilingual, that is, an artificially created bilingual inscription, the reading of some of the words of which is known from previously deciphered monuments. Having created such a bilingual, it was possible to work with it in the same vein in which Francois Champollion worked a century and a half ago with the actually extant Greco-Egyptian bilingual - the Rosetta stone (which allowed him to read Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time). A. A. Molchanov's method was highly appreciated by many outstanding scientists - academician A. V. Artsikhovsky, I. D. Amusin, N. Ya. Merpert, L. A. Gindin, O. S. Shirokov and others. It made it possible to read most of the signs of the Phaistos disc and not only in general terms, but also with a certain detail to understand the content of the inscription. According to Molchanov, the disc contains a message about the consecration of this subject in the sanctuary by the king of Knossos (the main center of ancient Crete) and the rulers of other Cretan cities subordinate to him. Obviously, the disc did not exist in a singular number: each of the participants in the dedication, most likely, received a personal copy made by duplication. One of these copies, which belonged to the ruler of Festus, has come down to us. It is possible in the future to find other copies of the disc or their fragments in Crete.the disc contains a message about the consecration of this object in the sanctuary by the king of Knossos (the main center of ancient Crete) and the rulers of other Cretan cities subordinate to him. Obviously, the disc did not exist in a singular number: each of the participants in the dedication, most likely, received a personal copy made by duplication. One of these copies, which belonged to the ruler of Festus, has come down to us. It is possible in the future to find other copies of the disc or their fragments in Crete.the disc contains a message about the consecration of this object in the sanctuary by the king of Knossos (the main center of ancient Crete) and the rulers of other Cretan cities subordinate to him. Obviously, the disc did not exist in a singular number: each of the participants in the dedication, most likely, received a personal copy made by duplication. One of these copies, which belonged to the ruler of Festus, has come down to us. It is possible in the future to find other copies of the disc or their fragments in Crete. It is possible in the future to find other copies of the disc or their fragments in Crete. It is possible in the future to find other copies of the disc or their fragments in Crete.
Signs of the Phaistos disc and their phonetic meanings according to Grinevich.
The text of the Phaistos disc in line layout.
In accordance with the hypothesis of Grinevich, a certain tribe of lynxes was forced to leave their homeland in Tripoli, in present-day Ukraine, and move to the island of Crete, where it created the distinctive culture of the island. Grinevich, back in Soviet times, several times addressed his hypothesis to the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies, the Institute of the Russian Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, but everywhere he received negative answers.
Who just tried to unravel the content of the mysterious inscription: historians, linguists, and simply lovers of antiquity around the world! What they tried to read on the Phaistos disc! Either a hymn in honor of the supreme deity, or a “guide” to the holy places of Crete, or a brief historical chronicle … Some researchers compared the signs on the disc with the signs of other known writing systems. Others tried to guess the meaning of the signs based on their appearance. Still others saw the clue, calculating how often certain signs are found in the inscription. To no avail.
One of the latest hypotheses was published in the journal Science and Life (see No. 1, 1998). Its author - the German philologist D. Olenroth - suggested that the inscription was made not by the signs of a real-life writing system, but by a kind of cipher behind which the letters of the classical ancient Greek alphabet are hidden. Based on this premise, Olenrot read on one side of the disc the magic formula of the ritual in honor of the Greek goddess Demeter, and on the other - information about the temple of Zeus in the city of Tiryns, one of the most important centers of the so-called Mycenaean civilization, which flourished in the II millennium BC in the south Balkan Peninsula.
Reading, and the approach to deciphering D. Olenroth, cause several fundamental objections.
Undoubtedly, everyone is free to act in their own way, you can start deciphering from a "blank slate". But it would probably be more correct if the author, starting to work on the inscription, relied on already firmly established facts. For example, today most researchers consider the writing system used on the disk not alphabetical, but syllabic. In other words, each sign of this writing corresponds not to one sound of speech (as in the Greek or any other alphabet), but to a whole syllable. It is estimated that there were 60-70 characters in the syllabic writing of the Phaistos disc, 45 of which are found on the disc itself. Everyone agrees that 60-70 characters are too much for an alphabetic letter (the modern Russian alphabet has 33 letters, the alphabets of European countries - and even less, the classical Greek alphabet had 27, and then 24 letters).
However, D. Olenrot tries to combine these two different writing systems. Some signs of the Phaistos disc, in his opinion, do not express single sounds, but diphthongs (that is, combinations of vowels, for example - ai, hey, eu). From my point of view, this does not add credibility to his hypothesis: diphthongs in the Greek language were always written separately. And the next one. According to the decoding proposed by Olenrot, the same Greek letter for some reason can be expressed on the disk in different signs. So, the letter "sigma" © corresponds to four different characters, the letter "iota" (and) - three, the letter "omicron" (o) - two … What is the point in using this kind of strange cipher? Yes, they simply could not be used.
As already mentioned, the Phaistos disc appeared in 1600 BC, and the material available today at the disposal of scientists proves that the Greek alphabet did not appear earlier than the 9th century BC. It was formed on the model of the Phoenician writing, as evidenced by the similarity in the outline of the letters, and even in their name. But the Phoenician letter itself (by the way, having signs only for consonants) nevertheless arose after the Phaistos disc. What gave the scientist reason to postpone the emergence of the Greek alphabet in more ancient times?
And finally, the third objection. Olenroth believes that the birthplace of the Phaistos disc is not Crete, where it was found, but mainland Greece. This follows from the Greek language, in which the inscription was supposedly composed (in Crete at that time, Greek was not yet spoken), and from its content, which tells about Greek, and not about Cretan temples.
However, a lot says that the Phaistos disc was created in Crete. Evidence of this is the insular origin of the clay from which the disc is molded, and the local, Cretan realities became the prototypes of all the signs of the disc. Particularly important is a copper poleaxe found by archaeologists in one of the Cretan caves, dating back to the same time as the disc. It has preserved a peculiar inscription made interspersed with the characters of the Phaistos disc and the so-called Linear A, which was widespread in Crete at that time. (With the help of letter A, Cretan, that is, Minoan, a non-Indo-European language, was transmitted.) And therefore, there is no doubt that these two writing systems functioned on the island at the same time, were interchangeable. Apparently, they were used in different spheres of life: Linear A served for business, household documents,and the writing of the Phaistos disc is for religious, sacred texts. This also confirms: the language of the Phaistos disc is not Greek, but Minoan.
Offering his decoding, Olenrot reads the inscription on the disc from the center to the edge and gets the meaning he needs. However, some experts who have researched the technique of applying signs believe that this process went from edge to center. It would seem that then the inscription should be read just like that.
So, despite some successes, the mystery of the writing of the Phaistos disc remains almost as insoluble as it was a century ago. How sad it is to realize it.