Phaistos Disc Arrow Sign

Only as a picture; its real meaning is unknown. Scholars number the disc's 45 different signs and give each a descriptive name, so this one is "arrow", sign 10. The name describes the drawing, a shaft with fletching at one end. Whether the scribe meant an arrow, a sound or a syllable cannot be checked, because no other text in this script survives.

Its direction can confuse you. The disc is usually read from the rim inward, and Unicode's charts show the signs mirrored so they suit left-to-right text. The arrow may face the other way in a photo of the disc than in your font; it is the same sign.

What is the Phaistos Disc?

A small clay disc, about 16 cm across, found in 1908. The Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier dug it up in the Minoan palace of Phaistos in southern Crete, and it is in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. Both faces carry about 241 sign impressions, arranged in a spiral and split into groups by lines. It is usually dated to the first half of the second millennium BCE, roughly the 18th to 17th century.

What makes it famous is how the signs were made: each was pressed into wet clay with a stamp, so it is often called the oldest known printed text. Its purpose is open; prayers, a hymn and a calendar have all been proposed, and links with Crete's Linear A script are discussed but unproven.