Jack and Costas watched the screen intently as Dillen loaded a CD-ROM into his laptop and linked it to the multimedia projector. The picture of the pottery discs was replaced by the symbols arranged as a column, each one fronting groups clustered together like words. They could see he had been applying similar techniques of analysis to those he had used to study the Greek script on the papyrus.
Jack reactivated the teleconference module and they were once again face to face with Dillen and Hiebermeyer two hundred miles away in Alexandria.
“Those are the symbols from the Phaistos discs,” Jack said.
“Correct.” Dillen tapped a key and the two discs reappeared, this time in the lower left-hand corner. “The thing that has most baffled scholars is that the discs are virtually identical, except in one crucial respect.” He moved a cursor to highlight various features. “On one side, what I call the obverse, both discs have exactly one hundred and twenty-three symbols. Both are segmented into thirty-one groupings, each comprising anywhere from two to seven symbols. The menu, if you like, is the same, comprising forty-five different symbols. And the frequency is identical. So the Mohican head occurs thirteen times, the marching man six times, the flayed oxhide eleven times, and so on. It’s a similar story on the reverse, except with thirty words and one hundred and eighteen symbols.”
“But the order and groupings are different,” Jack pointed out.
“Precisely. Look at the first disc. Walking man plus tree, three times. Sun disc plus Mohican head, eight times. And twice the entire sequence of arrow, baton, paddle, boat, oxhide and human head. None of these groupings occur on the second disc.”
“Bizarre,” Costas murmured.
“I believe the discs were kept together as a pair, one legible and the other meaningless. Whoever did this was trying to suggest that the type, number and frequency of the symbols were what was important, not their associations. It was a ruse, a way of diverting attention from the grouping of the symbols, of dissuading the curious from seeking meaning in the sequence.”
“But surely there is meaning in this,” Costas cut in impatiently. He clicked on his mouse to highlight combinations on the first disc. “Boat beside paddle. Walking man. Mohican man always looking in the same direction. Sheaf of corn. The circular symbol, presumably the sun, in about half the groupings. It’s some kind of journey, maybe not a real one but a journey through the year, showing the cycle of the seasons.”
Dillen smiled. “Precisely the line taken by scholars who believe the first disc contains a message, that it was not just decorative. It does seem to offer more sense than the second disc, more logic in the sequence of images.”
“But?”
“But that may be part of the ruse. The creator of the first disc may have deliberately paired symbols which seem to belong together, like paddle and boat, in the hope that people would attempt to decipher the disc in just this way.”
“But surely paddle and boat do go together,” Costas protested.
“Only if you assume they’re pictograms, in which case paddle means paddle, boat means boat. Paddle and boat together mean going by water, seafaring, movement.”
“Pictograms were the first form of writing,” Hiebermeyer added. “But even the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs were not all pictograms.”
“A symbol can also be a phonogram, where the object represents a sound, not a thing or an action,” Dillen continued. “In English we might use a paddle to represent the letter P, or the syllable
Costas slowly nodded. “So you mean the symbols on the discs could be a kind of alphabet?”
“Yes, though not in the strict sense of the word. The earliest version of our alphabet was the north Semitic precursor of the Phoenician alphabet of the second millennium BC. The innovative feature was a different symbol for each of the main vowel and consonant sounds. Earlier systems tended to be syllabic, each symbol representing a vowel and a consonant. That’s how we interpret the Linear A writing of the Minoans and the Linear B of the Mycenaeans.” Dillen tapped a key and the screen reverted to the image of the golden disc. “Which brings us to your wreck find.”
He magnified the image to show the mysterious symbol deeply impressed in the centre of the gold disc. After a pause it was joined by another image, an irregular black slab covered with three separate bands of finely spaced writing.
“The Rosetta stone?” Hiebermeyer looked baffled.
“As you know, Napoleon’s army of conquest in Egypt in 1798 included a legion of scholars and draughtsmen. This was their most sensational discovery, found near ancient Sais on the Rosetta branch of the Nile.” Dillen highlighted each section of text in turn, beginning at the top. “Egyptian hieroglyphics. Egyptian demotic. Hellenistic Greek. Twenty years later a philologist named Champollion realized these were translations of the same narrative, a trilingual decree issued by Ptolemy V in 196 BC when the Greeks controlled Egypt. Champollion used his knowledge of ancient Greek to translate the other two texts. The Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering hieroglyphics.” Dillen tapped a key and the stone disappeared, the screen again reverting to the image of the golden disc.
“Ignore that device in the centre for the moment and concentrate on the symbols round the edge.” He highlighted each of the three bands in turn, from outer to inner. “Mycenaean Linear B. Minoan Linear A. The Phaistos symbols.”
Jack had already guessed as much, but the confirmation still made his heart pound with excitement.
“Gentlemen, we have our very own Rosetta stone.”
Over the next few minutes Dillen explained that the Mycenaeans who took over Crete following the eruption of Thera originally had no script of their own, and instead had borrowed Linear A symbols from Minoan seafarers who had traded with mainland Greece. Their script, Linear B, was brilliantly deciphered soon after the Second World War as an early version of Greek. But the language of the Minoans had remained a mystery until earlier that year, when the largest ever cache of Linear A tablets had been discovered at Knossos. By great good fortune several of the tablets proved to be bilingual with Linear B. Now the gold disc offered the extraordinary possibility of deciphering the symbols of the Phaistos discs as well.
“There are no Phaistos symbols from Knossos and there’s no bilingual text for them,” Dillen continued. “I’d assumed it would be a lost language, one quite distinct from Minoan or from Mycenaean Greek.”
The others listened without interruption as Dillen worked methodically through the Linear A and Linear B symbols on the gold disc, showing their consistency with other examples of writing from Bronze Age Crete. He had arranged all of the symbols in rows and columns to study the concordance.
“I began with the first of the Phaistos discs, the one found a hundred years ago,” Dillen said. “Like you I thought this one most likely to be intelligible.”
He tapped the keyboard and all thirty-one groups of symbols from the obverse appeared with the phonetic translation beneath them.
“Here it is, reading from the centre outward following the direction of the walking man and the face symbols, as logic would seem to dictate.”
Jack quickly scanned the lines. “I don’t recognize any Linear words or see any of the familiar combinations of syllables.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.” Dillen tapped the keys again and another thirty-one groupings appeared in the lower part of the screen. “Here it is back to front, spiralling from the edge to the centre. It’s the same story. Absolutely nothing.”
The screen went blank and there was a brief silence.
“And the second disc?” Jack asked.
Dillen’s expression gave little away, only the hint of a smile betraying his excitement. He tapped the keys and repeated the exercise.
“Here it is, spiralling outwards.”
Jack’s heart sank as he again saw nothing recognizable in the words. Then he began to see pairings that looked oddly familiar.
“There’s something here but it’s not quite right.”
Dillen allowed him a moment more to stare at the screen.
“Back to front,” he prompted.
