The Phaistos Disk: A bilingual Iberian document?
Dr. Horst Friedrich
Germany
Summary: It is the author's thesis that the two texts on the sides of the as yet undeciphered Phaistos disk are written in two different but somehow related languages, by means of two different but related, probably syllabic "alphabets". Only a little more than half of the characters occur on both sides. The frequency, with which characters occur, is highly dissimilar for both sides. The distribution of word lengths is also dissimilar. Only one word occurs on both sides. After rejecting, as highly improbable, an origin of the Phaistos disk from Mediterranean or Near Eastern countries to the east of Sardinia, the thesis is proposed that our object might possibly hail from the greater Iberian West, and that only there can we hope to unearth similarly inscribed artefacts.