Re: The Phaistos Disc

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Apr 11 2006 - 17:06:25 CST

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    Suggestion: instead of discussing the Phaistos disc (given that it is undeciphered, nobody can ever claim it is really a script, it could be artisitic art, and the author used several symbolic representations, possibly with religious meaning), may be it will be more useful to encode other missing symbols that are more widely used, and very well known:

    * pieces in various strategy games (for example awele bowls, given than circled numbers are not very well suited for this game)
    * dice faces (not only 6-face cubes, but also other types)
    * card decks (tarot?)
    * symbols and pieces used in various games (e.g. in Monopoly(tm), hangman game, ...)
    * squared numbers and arrows (for crossword problems)
    * squared digits (for similar numeric problems)
    * religious African and Amerindian cabalistic symbols (spirals, wavy lines, rods, ...)
    * counting hands (with variable number of digits)
    * ...
    Note that many games include the idea of counting. Many of these symbols form numeric systems. And humans learnt to count and write counts before even writing the language.

    These are certainly much more used today with more general purpose. I'm sure there's a better and wider collection of very used symbols today that would benefit of such encoding. They will fit well at end of the SMP with other supplementary notational symbols.

    So if one cannot decipher the language behind the phaistos disc, it may just be a artistic representation of a numeric system (with the digits just aligned on the same piece of art), possibly associated with astrology (because humans started by counting days, moons, seasons and years, by looking to the sky, to anticipate their life, and to exchange goods and services with agreed values).



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