Phaestos disk

[Jona Lendering]

The Phaestos disk is apparently a fake - which may explain a couple of things (more...).

[Sean Manning]

That's very interesting. I'll have to look up the scholarly article. Here's hoping that the museum budges and lets them take a small sample for the thermoluminescence test.

[Jona Lendering]

Well, well... either the report that the Phaestos disk is a fake was a clever way to attract publicity, or this congress will be extremely amusing.

[Wander]

Considering that the Dr. Jerome Eisenberg running the conference is the same man who published the report identifying it as a hoax, I'm sure it will come as no surprise. It looks like the conference is his way of offering the disk's defenders a chance to present their cases, in the interest of equal time for both sides.

Now I gotta find a copy of Minerva magazine and read that article.

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

That sounds like a fair way to handle any issue.
I wonder when they analyzed the clay to check how evenly it was baked. And why you would not bake a clay tablet, to ensure it stayed intact? Surely a civilisation as advanced as the minoans had discovered the use of pottery? :?

[Sean Manning]

That sounds like a fair way to handle any issue.
I wonder when they analyzed the clay to check how evenly it was baked. And why you would not bake a clay tablet, to ensure it stayed intact? Surely a civilisation as advanced as the minoans had discovered the use of pottery? :?

That's not as surprising as you might think.

"The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they-' is almost always, 'Money.'' as Robert A. Heinlein put it. Baking tablets was expensive, especially in Mesopotamia where fuel is scarce, so it was the exception rather than the rule in regions which wrote on clay. Otherwise, you kept your archives in baskets indoors sheltered from damp, and soaked them when you were done with them. Many cuneiform documents survive because they were in a building which burned down and baked them for free.