Since it was discovered in 1908, the Phaistos Disk - one of the most important artifacts from Crete's minoan culture - has challenged scholars of diverse diciplines and captivated interests of amateurs. Its allure is primarily due to the fact that no one has been able to really solve its mystery. None of the numerous decipherments has found general acceptance or scientific approval. This book does not offer yet another attempt at deciphering the Disk. Rather, it is a short presentation of the various research efforts on the dating and origin, writing and language, as well as content and purpose of the Disk. This lively account of the most important aspects of a not-so-strictly-scholarly debate, which has gone on for decades, also includes a view of the putative solutions.

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A fascinating, accessible, and up-to-date history of the Ancient Greeks. Covering the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, and centred around the disunity of the Greeks, their underlying cultural unity, and their eventual political unification.

In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.

As a child I would often wonder when I saw an illustration of a stone tablet, and ask myself: What did the inscription mean? How did these people sound when they talked? What would that piece of clay say if it could speak! The enigma of the Phaistos Disc is revisited here in the light of new findings. From the various interpretations of the origin of the symbols depicted on the disc. Kober, Ventris, Chadwick and Bennett, the cryptologists are remembered for paving the way for us to understand the language and culture of early societies. Archaeological excavations, archaic languages and Myths are explored, together with theories of archaic Cretan relations as far away as the Black Sea. If this book enthuses just one person to forge ahead to uncover new information to allow “The Stones to Speak,” then I will be satisfied.