Ippolito Marmai

Two place names in the Phaistos disc Ippolito Marmai

The author's more than twenty-year research on Phaistós' disc and on Cretan 'hieroglyphic' writing, offers here a partial but original interpretation of the enigma that, for over a century, engages the scholars of the Minoan civilization. In March 2018, by means of photographic enlargements, he finally discovers on Phaistós' disc a detail never before considered by anyone, which proves in an incontrovertible way the verse of writing from left to right, from the center to the periphery of the disc. Previously, no one seems to have grasped the need to examine the document as a printed text reproducing a model, or type-graphic project. Such modality in itself involves a different approach of analysis, that can distinguish and discern the material factors (signs impressed on clay, their overlapping and deformations) from linguistic-grammatical factors (interpretation of the blank space at the end of the text, corrections of words and identification of the oblique stroke as a marker of proper names). In summary, we can say that, by keeping exclusively to the examination of the hieroglyphic text printed there, any possible research result would have remained without evidence, lacking external comparisons. The same applies for a research focused only on archival documents and seals, without taking into account the Phaistós disc.