ABSTRACT:
In 1908 the Italian archaeologist, L. Pernier, made an archaeological discovery at the Palace of Phaistos in Crete which has served ever since to excite the interest of expert and layman alike. This find was the now famed "Phaistos Disc" (or Disk), a circular wafer of baked clay, two centimeters thick and about sixteen centimeters in diameter, and covered on both sides by pictographic symbols spirally written. This book by Andis Kaulins, using the methods of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris and relying on the microscopic study of the disk by Yves Duhoux, deciphers the text as Ancient "hieroglyphic" Greek and shows it to involve a pre-Euclidean mathematical lemma about the paradox of whether parallel lines meet or diverge depending on their extension.
