Re: Phaistos disk (was: boustrophedon)

On Monday, July 15, 2002, at 02:12 , John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>>> My opinion is that it's a game board.
>>
>> With a different game printed on each side?
>
> Why not?  I own a number of chessboards with a backgammon board printed
> on the reverse.  Here the games would be rather more similar, to be sure;
No reason not indeed - but as you say the games would be similar.

> perhaps some sort of parcheesi-like game where the symbols (or some of
> them)
> have significance to the game: "take another turn", "back 5 spaces",
> "forward 3 spaces".
It's difficult see what else it would be other than some sort of race game
where one
moved from the circumference to the center.   If someone's gone to the
bother of
marking out the spiral and stamping different symbols onto the disk, one
assumes the
symbols must have had some significance.  There are 45 different types.
Also the game
needs to account for the bars separating the symbols into groups of
varying size, there
being 30 groups on one side and 31 on the other.

But the disk was found in a small room in the northwestern section of the
Palace of Phaistos.
The section was used only in the first phase of the New-Palace period, i.e.
  from 1700 to
1600 BC - hence we can be fairly precise in dating the disk.   But if it
was a parcheesi-like
game, one would IMO have expected some counters and the equivalent of dice
to be found
somewhere in the vicinity.   This was certainly the case with the gaming
board found in the
Palace of Knossos.

> I would rather believe such a theory than the claim that an entirely
> unknown script using an entirely un-heard-of manner of writing (spiral)
> exists in only a single exemplar.
Not so - there are Linear A examples of spiral writing from Knossos, on
the bezel of a gold
ring and on the insides of so-called "magic" cups.

Symbols not dissimilar from some of those at Phaistos have been found on a
bronze double-axe
from Arkalochori and, I believe, some others have since been discovered.

The location where the disk was found suggests that it was some sort of
sacral object.  That there
are 45 different types of sign has been taken by most as evidence that we
are dealing with a
syllabary of the CV type like as we know the later Linear B and the
Cypriote syllabary were.

It is quite likely IMO that in the earliest period each Palace site
developed its own variant of the
'Cretan syllabary'  - that is precisely what happened centuries later when
the Greeks adopted
the alphabet.

It has been noticed that some combinations of symbol-groups occur again &
again, sometimes at
regular intervals; and there is similar regular distribution of individual
signs.  Now this
could well occur if the disks were game-boards; but many have taken ot as
evidence that we have
a metrical text.  This, together with the locality of the find and of the
unusual nature of
the object, have led many to suspect that it is a chant, maybe a hymn to a
deity, used in
some sacred rite.   Some small signs looking like diacritics have been
thought by some to be
aids for the singer or reciter; but they could, I guess, equally well be
aids for the game
players.