BY THE ARCHAEOLOGIST EDITOR GROUP

Thousands of tourists line up at the Heraklion Museum in Crete, Greece

After the latest "Indiana Jones" film, which wants the famous archaeologist to try to solve the hidden and still undecoded secrets of a variant of the Phaistos Disc, the museum seems to have acquired special interest for foreigners.

The recent film "Indiana Jones and the Disc of Destiny" does not coincidentally refer to the secrets of the Phaistos Disc by linking it to that of the Antikythera Mechanism, thereby reviving global interest in its unsolved secrets, with Jones trying to prevent a friend of his from auctioning off the famous Disk in faraway Tangier and with his evil competitors stealing the precious archaeological find. Of course, according to the misinterpretation that exists in the film, the secrets of the Disc are hidden in its other half, which had been hidden for centuries in an ancient shipwreck in the Aegean Sea.

In fact, unfortunately, there is nothing of the sort that would reveal the secrets of the Phaistos Disc, not even a disc hidden elsewhere. Although British linguist Gareth Owens, who has lived for thirty years in Crete and has dedicated his career to solving the puzzle, claims to have deciphered more than 50% of the Disc, the books, publications, and related approaches of the most prominent archaeologists show that the road is still long.

But as the interest surrounding the secrets of the Disc has recently been rekindled, there are also various opposing opinions, such as those recorded by a recent German Netflix documentary, who want the clay Disc to be a fake, the creation of archaeologist Luigi Pernier, who discovered it in the excavations he carried out at the beginning of the last century in the basement of room XL-101 of the Minoan palace of Phaistos.

**The Phaistos Disc, Museum of Heraklion, Crete**

*Photo by:* *Dimosthenis Vasiloudis*

At least this is what the American antiquarian Jerome Eisenberg claims, which is not accepted by the entire scientific community. In fact, Gareth Owens, who is an expert on Minoan writing and has dedicated his life to it, collaborated with the Professor of Phonetics at the University of Oxford, John Coleman, to provide a solution to the reason and why this impressive clay disc was made by the Minoan Bronze Age, which dominates a special display case in a room of the Heraklion Museum.

According to the linguist, who is the only one who has come to any coherent opinion about its secrets, the mistake scientists have made so far is to read the Phaistos Disc with the phonetic values of Linear B by comparing it with others related to the Indo-European language, which didn't help since its script appears to be a combination of Minoan Linear A and a special hieroglyphic language that remains to be deciphered. As many Greek archaeologists have revealed, such writings can be found on the famous seals that have come to light from different excavations.

The problem is that the hitherto unsolved secrets of the Disc have not only helped to record its contents but also to reveal its purpose for existence. However, according to the theory of Owens, who compared the types of writing, there are indications that the Discus on one side refers to the pregnant goddess Aphrodite, while on the other it refers rather to her death.