An Application of Software Engineering for Investigating the Language of Phaistos Disk

Abstract

The Disk of Phaistos is a thirty-seven centuries old artifact, made of clay, which was discovered in 1908 at the Minoan palace of Phaistos (Crete). On its two sides, it bears the oldest known imprinted text of unknown content. The decipherment of this text is over a century-old unsolvable riddle, despite the various attempts for this purpose. Many of these attempts claim that the underlying language is a dialect of early Greek, yet each interpretation is different from any other. The purpose of this article is to describe the results of a decipherment algorithm, based on pattern matching of linguistic motifs, that investigates the possible Greek origin of the text by focusing on the language of Linear-B, which is the closest contemporary Greek dialect of Bronze Age Aegean.