While its unique features initially led some scholars to suspect a forgery or hoax, the disk is now generally accepted by archaeologists as authentic.

This mysterious object captured the imagination of amateur and professional palaeographers, and many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs.

Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier recovered the intact "dish" on 3 July 1908 during his excavation of the first Minoan palace.

Their content was poor in precious artifacts, but rich in black earth and ashes, mixed with burnt bovine bones.

In the northern part of the main cell, in the same black layer, a few centimetres south-east of the disc and about 50 cm (20 in) above the floor, Linear A tablet 'PH-1' was also found.

Doubting the viability of Pernier's report, Louis Godart (1990) resigns himself to admitting that archaeologically, the disc may be dated to anywhere in Middle or Late Minoan times (MMI–LMIII, a period spanning most of the second millennium B.C.).

[8] The most remarkable feature of the Phaistos disk is that the embossed signs that comprise its inscription all result from pressing separate stamps – one for each symbol – into the soft clay before firing.

[9][10] Typesetter and linguist Herbert Brekle writes:[11] If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a "printed" text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographic principle.

The decisive factor is that the material "types" are proven to be repeatedly instantiated on the clay disc.A medieval example of a similar blind printing technique[12] is the Prüfening dedicatory inscription.

[11][13] Popular-science author Jared Diamond describes the disc as an example of a technological innovation that did not become widespread because it was made at the wrong time in history.

The presumed start of the text, adjacent to the edge, is also marked by such a radial stroke, with the addition of five dots punched along it with the stylus.

In addition to these, a small diagonal line was incised with a stylus (not stamped) underneath some signs, a total of 18 times.

The signs were added to the Unicode universal computer character (UCS) set in 2008, after a 2006 proposal by Michael Everson and John H.

The sign images below are reversed left-to-right relative to their appearance on the disk, reflecting their presentation in most Western books and articles.

[15][17] Many of the signs are depictions of concrete objects with a recognizable general nature (such as humans, birds, plants, a boat), or parts thereof (heads, hides, flowers).

The sign names assigned by scholars, in particular by Godart[16] and the Unicode consortium,[15] were rather arbitrary, often based on the slightest shape similarity.

[18] However, this hypothesis was cast in doubt by the discovery of a vase with a nearly identical symbol incised on the bottom, believed to be a potter's mark.

[20]: 649 The signs are laid out on each side as a single spiral text, which is split by the inscribed radial strokes into groups.

However, most scholars ignore that possible stroke and count the last three symbols as a single "word" 10-03-38 (which happens to occur also at about the same position on the next-to-last turn).

[16] On both sides, there is a radial line also right before the start (outermost end) of the text, with five dots punched along it using a sharp round stylus.

The following transcriptions of the text all assume a right-to-left (clockwise, edge-to-center) reading direction on the disk, starting at the vertical (radial) line of five dots.

For consistency with most published sources, these transcriptions assume that there is an oblique stroke at the end of word A24, even though high-resolution images show it to be just a crack.

The representation of the ship also differs from all similar designs that occur either among the hieroglyphic or the linear documents of Crete.Gustave Glotz claimed that the clay was not from Crete.

[30] The uniqueness of the script, of the spiral arrangement, and of the method of writing (individual glyph stamps) have led some scholars to raise the possibility that the Phaistos disc is a 1908 forgery or hoax.

Many attempts have been made to decipher the code behind the disc's signs, with a wide variety of theories having been suggested, including prayers, a narrative or an adventure story, a "psalterion", a call to arms, a board game, and a geometric theorem; some of these theories are considered to be pseudoarchaeology, with little realistic chance of being accurate.

While the Phaistos disk writing system is, on the whole, very different from other known scripts, several scholars have argued against it being an entirely independent invention.

[39] Parallels between the Phaistos disk script and Anatolian hieroglyphs were proposed, among others, by S. Davis in 1961[40][41][42] and Jan Best and Fred Woudhuizen in 1988.

[43][44] In 2004, Winfried Achterberg and others proposed an extensive mapping to Anatolian hieroglyphs, which led them to a full decipherment claim.

A purely logographical reading is not linguistic in the strict sense: while it may reveal the meaning of the inscription, it will not allow for the identification of the underlying language.

These characters were encoded with strong left-to-right directionality, and so in code charts and text (such as elsewhere on this page) the glyphs are mirrored from the way they appear on the disc itself.