from Minerva - The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology
International Phaistos Disk Conference 2008 - sponsored by Minerva
Society of Antiquaries, London 31 October – 1 November 2008
"Andis Kaulins, J.D., Traben-Trarbach, Germany
The Phaistos Disc: An Ancient Enigma Solved: Two Corroborative Old Elamite Scripts can be Deciphered Using the Greek Syllabic Values Obtained for the Phaistos Disc
Genuine or fake? This important issue was raised about the Phaistos Disk by Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D., editor of Minerva. How can anyone prove, without any other probative evidence, that a virtually isolated artefact, one of a kind, is the real thing, and, similarly, how can one establish the correctness of an alleged decipherment of an isolated script without the presence of any corroborative texts? Eisenberg had hit the nail on the head. The Phaistos Disk presented the scholarly world with a vexing problem. This problem led Andis Kaulins, author of an alleged decipherment of the Phaistos Disk in the years 1977-1980, to look for a potentially corroborative script from the Ancient World that might have surfaced in the intervening 30 years. To the author’s own great surprise, two allegedly corroborative scripts were found, Old Elamite scripts from the distant culture of Elam, which the author has deciphered to be Ancient Greek text via his deciphered Greek syllabic values for symbols found on the Phaistos Disk as applied to the nearest similar pictographs found in Old Elamite, a script also not yet fully deciphered. The Old Elamite scripts are shown to be funerary dedications, one to the ancient ‘Babylonian’ king Labynetus, by his wife and companion Nitokris, and the other to Nitokris herself, identified as a Mycenaean, far from home. Perhaps Nitokris was the true ‘Helen’ of Troy of ancient Greek legend."