The Minoan culture on Crete existed around 2100-1420 BC leaving hundreds of inscriptions on
seals sealings and other artefacts. The most well-known inscription among them can be found on
the Phaistos disk a small clay disk with impressed signs on both sides. Deciphering it is one
of the greatest challenges leading to better understanding the Minoan language and
culture.First and foremost the book offers a new general methodology in epigraphy for
deciphering writing systems. Mathematical and statistical methods enable one to arrive at basic
principles underlying the writing system and the root language. It allows one to begin a
decipherment based on scientifically verified knowledge and to exclude false assumptions. While
previous works on the Phaistos disk have either had to declare the impossibility of deciphering
it or have suggested dubious interpretations based on preconceived assumptions the present
study aims to present a scientifically verifiable method for a step-by-step decipherment of the
Phaistos disk. Now by the end of the decipherment about 85% of the signs on the Phaistos disk
can for the most part be read with a high degree of confidence. The discovered sound values and
meanings of all the signs are then checked against other hieroglyphic inscriptions from Crete.
It follows from the analysis that the Phaistos disk belongs to the writing system of both the
Cretan and the Luwian hieroglyphs and that the texts are written in the Luwian language. The
Phaistos disk and other Cretan-Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions can therefore be considered to
belong to a uniform linguistic area which extended from Crete to Western Anatolia during the
Aegean Bronze Age.
