How Not to Decipher the Phaistos Disc: A Review Article Le déchiffrement du disque de Phaistos: Preuves et conséquences by Jean Faucounau Review by: Yves Duhoux American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 104, No. 3 (Jul., 2000), pp. 597-600 Published by: Archaeological Institute of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/507232 . Accessed: 10/04/2012 09:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Archaeological Institute of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Archaeology. http://www.jstor.org How Not to Decipher the Phaistos Disc: A Review YVES DUHOUX LE DECHIFFREMENT DU DISQUE DE PHAISTOS: on both sides of the disc.3 This drawing has fooled many a soul, even Alice Kober.4 To "correct" an estab- PREUVESET CONSEQUENCES,by Jean Faucounau. good lished text is impermissible and dooms any attempt at a 192, 45, indices 2. L'Harmattan, Paris Pp. figs. credible decipherment (P. Faure, for example, deliber- 1999. FF 120. ISBN 2-7384-7703-8 (paper). ately introduces some signs in the text to make it read the way he wants).5 Faucounau's book is the latest of many attempts to deci- Equally important is the direction of writing. In the pher the Phaistos disc (see select bibliography at the end). case of the Phaistos disc, a decipherment based on a read- The inscribed clay disc was found by the Italian archaeolo- ing from the interior to the exterior is wrong, since sev- gist L. Pernier during his 1908 excavations in one of the eral peculiarities demonstrate that the disc was stamped dependencies of the Minoan palace at Phaistos, in south from the exterior to the interior, with the exception of a central Crete, and is now in Heraklion. The inscription few corrections made after impression. On this criterion runs on both sides of the disc and consists of 241 signs alone, the attempts by numerous authors are suspect.' B. impressed (not incised) into fresh clay by means of ap- Schwartz presents a variant of this reading,7 supposing plied stamps. It is not, as one often reads, the earliest that the disc was indeed stamped from the exterior to example of printing but rather of a kind of typewriting. the interior, but the resulting inscription served as an The inscription follows a spiral incised by a stylus. The intaglio to be read in the opposite direction. The idea object's archaeological context indicates that it was depos- that the disc could itself have functioned like a large ited at Phaistos sometime in MM II-IIIB (ca. 1850-1600 signet is wonderfully bizarre. B.C.). The Minoan character of the disc, regularlydebated The class of script must be established as well. The in the past, is assured thanks to an impressive series of disc carries 45 signs that appear to be naturalistic repre- points in common with indisputably Minoan artifacts.Un- sentations of living beings or of objects, plus 2 other til now the script on the disc seems unique even if it signs, an oblique line incised below certain final signs typologically resembles that on the Arkalokhori ax. (conventionally represented here by +) and the five Suggested decipherments are legion, and the proposi- dots placed at the beginning of both faces. Most known tions go in all possible and imaginary directions: Basque, scripts consist of two kinds of components, phonetic Chinese (!), Dravidian, Greek, Hittite, Luwian, "Pelas- signs and ideograms. An ideogram (or pictogram or logo- gian," Semitic, Slavic, and Sumerian, to name a few. And gram or ideograph) is any sign used to convey an entire several different decipherments propose the same lan- meaning (e.g., numbers [1, 2, 3, 4] and diacritical marks, guage, especially ancient Greek. In one of his last writ- such as punctuation signs). Phonetic signs (e.g., letters, ings, the lateJohn Chadwick said he "should be grateful such as a, b, c, d) do not signify meaning. Generally, one if those who produce their own solutions would kindly not of these two elements is dominant in any given script- send them" to him1 (his italics). In any case, if one of the script I am writing now is dominantly phonetic. How these decipherments is correct, all the others are wrong. many different signs does a text of the same length as It will be helpful if I begin by outlining a short list of the disc contain? A Western alphabet like modern En- basic, verifiable criteria on which any decipherment stands glish should generally contain between 20 and 30 dif- or falls: the rules of the game, as it were. If a tentative ferent signs, the Cypriot syllabary about 40, Linear B decipherment founders indubitably on a point that is about 50, the Sumerian cuneiform syllabary about 60, agreed to be completely certain, it will have little chance and the Chinese ideographic system about 145.8 It is of gaining acceptance on a point that is problematic and clear that the approximately 40 different signs locate uncertain, the decipherment itself. the Phaistos disc among dominantly phonetic syllabic One first needs an established text.2A surprising num- scripts; therefore, any supposition that the disc is prima- ber of would-be decipherers have relied on the drawing rily or exclusively ideogrammatic raises problems.9 published by Evansin 1909, which is unfortunately wrong: One should further expect the disc's syllabary to con- Evans's draughtsman drew five dots at the start of face B form fairly well to that of securely deciphered parallel but only four at the start of face A, even though Evans scripts. In Linear B and in the Cypriot syllabary, no sign explicitly mentioned "a line showing five punctuations" stands for a lone consonant. Any grid that assigns a con- 'Chadwick1999, 38. 6E.g., Ephron 1962; Faure 1976; Georgiev 1976; Gordon 2See Duhoux 1977;Godart 1993; Olivier 1975. 1966; Ohlenroth 1996. 3Evans1909, 274. 7Schwartz 1981, 784-5. 4Kober 1948, 87. 8Duhoux 1980, 1989. 5Faure 1976. 9E.g., Pomerance 1976. 597 AmericanJournal ofArchaeology104 (2000) 597-600 598 YVES DUHOUX [AJA 104 sonantal value to signs has therefore an excellent chance us compare the language of the disc to Linear A and to of being wrong.'? distinguish it from Linear B.'5 Since the language of Lin- The technique of decipherment must be sound. The ear A seems to have few comparisons with Greek (the acrophonic principle (e.g., a picture of a dog stands for word for "total" in Linear A reads KU-RO in Linear B the sound d or do) is an admirable means of arriving at a values, while in Linear B it reads to-so), deciphering the suspect decipherment. It often turns out that the inter- Phaistos disc as Greek stands an excellent chance of be- pretation of the object said to be depicted by the sign is ing suspect. Hypothetically, however, if the language of arguable. S. Davis and C.H. Gordon both systematically the disc has not only a typological relationship (frequent use the acrophonic principle as a method of interpreta- use of "prefixes" and doubled signs) but also a genetic tion" and should therefore be used with caution. Anoth- relationship with the language of Linear A, we might be er good way of engendering suspicion is to adopt readings able to use one corpus to illuminate the other. based upon resemblances to different scripts: V. Geor- A decipherment should be internally coherent, with giev bases his acrophonic readings on resemblances to few irregularities, and should make plausible sense. To signs in Luvian hieroglyphic and Linear B.'2 argue (as some have done) that certain signs have a vari- The hypothetical language of the document should able phonetic reading is suspect. S. Davis produced a text be reasonably chosen. While many possibilities are open, that is virtually gibberish,'6 and E. Bowden's work con- it is hardly reasonable to go a great distance from the tains passages such as the following: "[S]ign 3 is a Hel- Mediterranean in search of candidate languages, such lene missionary priest to the less advanced horse as Chinese. Greek is probably the language most often pastoralists of west Anatolia.""7 proposed,'3 and I would be quite happy should the disc Finally, we need to ask if a text is long enough actually turn out to have been written in that language. But is it to support a decipherment. In cryptography, the closer possible? the number of signs of a text coincides with the number If one examines the text of the disc, one can see that given by the formula of "unicity distance," the less likely it contains what look like grammatical elements, that is, this script could be deciphered. EJ.W. Barber assumes a "prefixes" and "suffixes" that occur before and after a syllabary of 100 signs in the Phaistos disc,'8 getting a "radical" (the part of a "word" that bears its lexical mean- unicity distance of 225, not far from the number of signs ing). Here are three examples of several presumably gram- impressed on the disc (241), and she presumes therefore matical variations that appear in the disc's text, with the that the text is too short.