First Movable Type is a fake? (no, not that Movable Type)
Kevin Kelly blogs about the Phaistos Disc, an archeological object some believe is the oldest historic example of moveable type -- the concept, of course, not the blogging platform. Snip:
Is the "First Movable Type" a Hoax? [ The Technium ]The characters on the clay disc were stamped from a set of "seals" creating a text written in a spiral, although neither the text nor the language of the text has been deciphered.
(...) On my shelf I have a small bronze replica of this object simply because it is a beautiful mandala. The fired-clay Disc which it replicates was discovered in 1908. However this week a specialist in faked ancient art claims that the original object is ...well... faked ancient art. In other words that the Phaistos Disc is a hoax. In addition to this expert's technical reasons you can add two others: no other example of the writing has been found, and even the shape and format of the object is unique.
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Of course its a fake. I bought the original in Malaysia for $1. Its sitting in my Dining Room and Im looking at it right now :-)
I'm glad you anticipated the first thing that popped into my head... It's reassuring to know I'm not the geekiest person in the world.
Recalling my visit to Knossos as a classics student, I'm sure that the 'linear A' on this disc was already assumed to be possibly fake. Pretty disc, but no surprise coming from Schliemann, Evans and their ilk. Fakers all! But very good at it.
Ô my god, very great discovery. But, fake or reality ?
Sure it's a fake . . . by the Atlanteans.
no other example of the writing has been found, and even the shape and format of the object is unique.
And I believe this proves my point.
Nonsense! It is a relic from inside Hollow Mars, brought to our world eons ago by Space Elvis.
By the same reasoning, if paleontologists find only one specimen of dinosaur X then it's a fake. Sometimes people come up with new things you know.
I think this is simply another case where 'truthiness' is much, much cooler than 'truth'.
"no other example of the writing has been found, and even the shape and format of the object is unique."
Couldn't it just be that this is from a previously undiscovered culture? I mean really, who's to say that we already discovered everything there is to discover about all the past cultures? isn't that a little pompous? Is it really that hard to believe it might be from a culture we don't yet know about?
Hey, maybe the maker of the Phaistos disk was just doodling (while taking a call on the hornphone).
Faked or poorly identified artifacts are unfortunately rather common - take the Jesus Ossuary or the "pre-Columbian" crystal skulls for instance. This thing has not only at least 10 symbols from Linear A, but also other languages from other times and places including Linear B, Proto-Ionian, Anatolian, Semitic and Indo-European among others.
easy to explain; aliens
@ PLANSAMAN,
Umm, what do these symbols in "Anatolian, Semitic" or "Indo-European" look like? We're looking at graphemes here, not language families... Orthography is the representation of a given language, it is not 'language' itself. Each of the language families you'd mentioned have exemplars covering multiple writing systems, so no 'root' writing system can be inferred.
ZULUDADDY,
Umm, try reading the ORIGINAL CITATION in the July/August issue of Miverva, my pedantic friend.
oops, that's Minerva.
UNICODE 5.1 contains encodings for Linear A (Phaistos) as well as the more intelligible and prevalent Linear B.
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U101D0.pdf
I've had a nice plaster copy of it for more than 30 years. I'm now of the opinion it's an ancient copy protection key.
Cool that Unicode includes this. How about Voynich manuscript text?
looks like the dialing device from stargate
@JHHL
The Phaistos disc is not written in Linear A; there are no other known extant examples of the Phaistos signs, hence the difficulty in decipherment.
Nature [1] covered this story, in part, last month. As Eisenberg says, the best way to establish or refute authenticity would be a thermoluminescence test - a technique which establishes an approximate date of last firing - which is unlikely to happen, to say the least, because "no Greek scholar or politician would dare to help 'destroy' such a national treasure".
[1] Nature 453, 990-991 (19 June 2008)