August 3, 2015 • 33 mins
Like other artifacts that defy deciphering, this clay disk, found on Crete in the early 1900s, has puzzled researchers and stirred up controversy for decades. Is it a religious incantation, a calendar, a spell? Or is it all a pictogram hoax?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class fun stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Polly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, it's been
a little while since we've had a history mystery, and
I love them so much. I feel like I always
have to restrain myself from doing a bunch of them.
(00:21):
And history mystery is just fun to say. Indeed, it
doesn't like a little rhyme. So we're gonna talk about
one today. And this one is an artifact that's been
studied for more than a hundred years. Although some have
claimed to figure it out, there's really no consensus about it.
So we're gonna be talking about Minoan crete and the
face does disc which was unearthed in And this is
an artifact which features symbols that, like the Voyage Manuscript,
(00:45):
have really puzzled researchers for decades. But like I said,
no one has been able to agree on what it is,
although there's some people pretty vehement, especially in recent times,
that they have got this thing figured out. So create
of course, it's in the eastern Mediterranean. See the island
is about two hundred kilometers or a hundred and twenty
four miles across east to west. It ranges from twelve
(01:06):
to fifty eight kilometers or seven and a half to
thirty six miles north to south. Manollan's often credited as
the first European civilization, had a decentralized sort of culture
which did a pretty brisk export business. So timber, food, olive, oil, wool,
and die were among the many goods that Creates sold
or traded, and their most popular imports were precious metals,
(01:30):
precious stones, and ivory. Minoan culture had contact with Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and Phoenicia, and they were constantly influenced a lot by
all of those cultures. If you've listened to our episode
on the Phoenician alphabet, you may recall that part of
the development of that alphabet came to the need of
creating this unified system of communication for trading with all
(01:50):
these various Mediterranean cultures. And we know that crete was
inhabited as early as the seventh millennium b C, although
it wasn't until after the fifth millennium BC that we
really start to see pottery in the timeline, and that
sort of marks the beginning of the Manoan civilization. There
are a couple of different ways that the Minoan civilization
has divided into periods. One method is based on this
(02:13):
pottery and marks changes in the style of pottery. This
divides it as the Early period dating from three thousand
to twenty one d b C, the Middle period from
twenty one DUDE, and a late period dating from fifteen
hundred to eleven hundred BC. And there's an alternative way
of looking at the timeline of Minoan civilization and breaking
(02:35):
it up, and that's based sort of on architecture. Is
its linked to the culture, and this separates it into
four segments. So this breaks Minoan crete into a pre
palatial period from twenty hundred to nineteen hundred BC, a
proto palatial period from nineteen hundred to seventeen hundred b C,
a neo palatial period from seventeen hundred to fourteen hundred
(02:57):
b C, and a post palatial period from fourteen hundred
to eleven fifty b C. The Facets disc was discovered
in nineteen o eight. It was found on crete in
what's called the Old Palace of Manoan face Does. The disc,
made of fired clay, has been dated to eighteen fifty
to fifteen, with an estimate of about seventeen hundred BC
(03:20):
as the more exact date. This means it pre dates
the time that the Phoenicians would have been developing their alphabet.
It also means it falls into the Middle Minoan period
if you're looking at the pottery based breakdown of the timeline,
and it sort of straddles the proto palatial and neo
palatial uh periods. On the alternate timeline circuit two thousand
(03:41):
b c E. In the crossover period between the pre
palatial and proto palatial periods, the political system shifted and
Minoan create became more centralized around a king. Remember we
had said earlier it was decentralized prior to this, and
this is also when these palaces became part of the
landscape of crete. They served a sort of both centers
of government and community. While there was a great deal
(04:04):
of upheaval around the shift from a decentralized culture the
one that was focused on a central figure, things seem
to settle into a peaceful period. Not long afterward, some event,
and we don't know exactly what it was, if it
was a natural disaster along the lines of an earthquake,
or if Minoan creed was invaded, but some event destroyed
(04:24):
these palaces that had become administrative centers, and this destruction
and the rebuilding of the lost palaces mark the transition
to the neo palatial period, and this neo palatial period
is also considered the time when Minoan culture was at
its apex. Next we will talk about this disk in
more detail, but first let's have a break to talk
about one of the awesome sponsors who make this show possible.
(04:47):
So most people will do whatever it takes to make
sure that their small business runs efficiently, and that means
sometimes that that involves constant trips to the post office,
but that can actually get in the way of efficiency.
So as stamps dot Com, you will be able to
spend less time at the post office and more time
actually growing your business. Stamps dot Com makes mailing and
shipping super easy. You just use your own computer and
(05:07):
your printer to purchase and print official US postage and
that's gonna work for any letter and any package that
you need to send. Stamps dot Com basically does all
of the thinking for you. So you have a digital
scale that's going to calculate the exact postage that you
need and it will actually help you decide on the
best class of mail you need to choose based on
your needs. So join more than five hundred thousand small
(05:28):
businesses that you stamps dot com and never worry about
going to the post office again. Right now, you can
use our promo code, which is stuff for a special
offer and that gets you a no risk trial plus
a one dollar bonus offer that includes a digital scale
and up to fifty five dollars worth of free postage.
So don't wait, go to stamps dot com. But before
you do anything else, click on the microphone at the
(05:50):
top of the home page and type in stuff that's
stamps dot com and enter stuff. So now to talk
about the actual disc, now that we've kind of set
up where it would have fallen in the timeline in
terms of Minoa Greek culture, the disc itself is pretty small.
The diameter ranges from fifteen point eight to sixteen point
five centimeters, which is six point two to six point
(06:11):
five inches, depending on where that diameter measurement is taken. Uh,
this is one of those things. I have seen pictures
of it at various points through the years, and in
my head it was always so much bigger than that.
That then, when I was working on research for this,
I think it's something. Yeah, it's like when we did
the episode on the ant together a device which I
similarly thought was quite large until you were like, no,
it's like little she boxed little. Uh. And the thickness
(06:34):
of this disc ranges from one point six to two
point one centimeters, so that's about point six to point
eight inches in thickness. There's a spiral pattern of more
than two hundred and forty images on the disc, featuring
forty five different symbols. In the very center of Side
A is what looks like a simple flower, and then
the symbols spiral out from there in groups that range
(06:56):
from two to seven in number. There are vertical lines
that set break these groups. Side B has a symbol
that's made of wavy lines and sort of a rounded
triangular shape at the center. Yeah, And as Tracy just said,
which was in my notes, it kind of the there's
an image in the center and then it sort of
spirals out from there. But there are actually two different
(07:17):
theories about how this spiraling really works in which direction
it's supposed to go. So one approach points out that
the symbols are oriented to the right, so faces that
are in profile, there's one that's often called the punk
and it looks like a dude to the mohawk UH,
and it looks to the right. And figures that appear
to be walking or in motion also look like they're
(07:38):
walking to the right. And this has led some scholars
to the conclusion that the disk should be read uh
spiraling outward from left to right. This is also supported
by a sort of erupt end point in the spiral,
where at the very end where the last loop kind
of meets up with the previous one, there's a hard
vertical line that's punctuated with several dots. It looks like
(08:00):
a very final sort of symbol to some people. The
opposite reading direction, which goes from right to left and
spirals inward, is supported by the fact that some symbols
occasionally overlap the symbols on their right. This indicates that
the stamping was done from right to left. Yeah, so
just like you wouldn't write a word with the last
(08:21):
letter first and then go backwards most people, maybe some
people learn to write backwards, but their ideas that they
wouldn't be overlapping in that way, because normally you would
write it the way it would be uh, beginning to end,
So that suggests that it goes that way. And the
symbols we've mentioned that they were stamped, they appear to
(08:41):
have been stamped in the clay before firing. And what's
sort of interesting is that, uh, these stamps don't appear
to repeat even when they're very similar to one another,
Like it's the same punk that reappears, but it doesn't
look quite the same. So there may have been more
than one stamp for that. Uh. So, Yeah, symbols that
are almost identical don't look like they were made with
the same stamp. And there are a few positions in
(09:02):
the clay uh that look like it was stamped and
then maybe reworked, kind of smoothed out almost to erase
the stamp, and then re stamped prior to firing. Unlike
the symbols, the spiral line from the center out and
the lines that break up the segments of the symbols
look like they were carved into the disk by hand
rather than stamped. Dashes and dots also appear in some
(09:24):
of the symbol groupings. These elements, particularly the dashes, may
have some kind of significance, or they may have been
accidentally imprinted as the disc was being made. Yeah, they
they're not consistent in where they appear, like in some
cases they appear near the beginning of each UH segment,
but they don't do that to all the segments. So
we're not sure, and there is never, as we've said before,
(09:46):
been a consensus among researchers and scholars. So what these
symbols represent. Some are obvious pictograms, they look like humans
like I talked about the punk, they look like fish
or flowers, while others of them are more abstract, kind
of like with as you mentioned earlier, that the center
point on side B is like wavy lines in this
triangle that's got kind of rounded edges because of this mix.
(10:07):
It's clearly not specifically just a pictograph item, but there
are too many different symbols for it to likely be
an alphabet. So it's possible that the symbols represents syllables
that's a very popular approach to analysis, and that each
segment of symbols creates a single word. But the syllabary
theory has problems as well. For one thing, if the
(10:28):
symbols on the face dose disc formed a syllabary language,
there would be a more even distribution of the symbols.
There are also no one syllable words and very few
to syllable syllable words present if the disc is interpreted
this way, which would be pretty unusual for a language. Yeah,
it's one of those things whereas I was researching and
(10:48):
saw that, I'm like, is that And then I'm looking
at my own typing and I'm like, half of these
words have only one or two syllables. Well, there, I
think there are languages that have on average longer words
but still generally have shorter words. Also, Yeah, for most languages,
shorter words to make up sort of the bulk of
the language, and then you get compound words that are
(11:09):
like mixes of the shorter words. Right. So it is
also possible that this disc is a mix of communication forms.
It could be a combination of pictogram and syllabary, and
we're going to talk a little bit more about why
that's a possibility in just a moment. Many theories have
emerged into what this disc actually is, although there's no
real evidence for any of them. It's been suggested that
(11:30):
it's a letter of fertility ritual some form of musical notation,
a list of royalty, a religious hymn, a spell, a
geometry theorem. It goes on and on and on and
on and on. But without similar discs to reference against,
these are all really just stabs in the dark. Yeah.
But the one thing that people mostly do agree on,
(11:51):
and this was not always the case, is that it
is pretty commonly believed and accepted that the disc did
in fact originate on crete and wasn't created somewhere else
and then brought there. So many attempts have been made
to decrypt this disc through the years. In nine five,
Jean Faccuonau of Luxembourg believed that the language was a
(12:11):
pre Greek syllabic form of writing employed by a proto
Ionian culture. His translation of the disc tells the story
of the rain and eventual passing of a king. Most
fais does disc scholars rejected this interpretation. However, there have
been other interpretations put forth through the years, but all
of them have had a similar fate in the classics community. Yeah,
(12:34):
they've all really been dismissed pretty readily. But there is
a very recent interpretation theory that is now being discussed,
and this was introduced just last year. So in May
of Minoan language and classic scholar Gareth Owens gave a
tedex talk about his work with the fasts disc. He
(12:57):
and other researchers worked together with their not knowledge of
the writing forms Manohan linear A, Minoan linear B, and
cretent pictographic hiero hieroglyphic language over the course of six
years to assign syllables to the pictograms on the disc.
Cretent pictographic script was in use circa nineteen fifty to
(13:19):
seventeen hundred b c E. And the symbols used in
this writing form are pretty clearly drawn from real objects.
So there's a lot of animals and humans and plant
life representation. So for context on these writing forms that
we just mentioned, Cretan pictographic script was in use circa
nineteen fifty and nineteen or seventeen hundred b c E.
(13:40):
And the symbols used in this writing form are pretty
clearly drawn from real objects such as animals and humans
and plant life. Linear A is believed to have been
used on crete from about eighteen fifty to fourteen hundred BC.
It's a syllabic language, and while we know that some
of the phonetics represented by most of the symbols. We
don't really know the language of linear A. Linear A
(14:03):
has been found on artifacts and crete as well as
the a g and islands. And you probably noticed an
overlap as we were just talking about those two in
the times of use, when Cretan pictograph and linear a,
we're both being used. And we don't know why both
the more primitive and the more advanced writing forms were
being used concurrently for so long, but that could somehow
(14:26):
explain the idea that the writing on the disc is
a combination of different forms, as a sort of linguistic
evolution snapshot. Linear B is an adaptation of linear A.
It's believed that this was a version of the writing
form UH and that it contains more than nineties signs.
The script was used for financial records and was used
in palaces of many of continental Greece's cities. Linear B
(14:50):
is considered incredibly important linguistically because vestiges of this dialect
remain in evidence from Homer's writings. Yeah, it really didn't
have a long lasting influence, and it's common when interpreting
something like the face does disc for classicists and researchers
to work backward from linear B to linear AID to
create and pictogram writing. When they're working to interpret these
(15:13):
texts and using this so called epigraphic continuity, which is
one of the things that Owen's calls it, he's developed
his interpretation of the Facets disk, and Owen's reading of
the disc also suggests reading it inwards, starting at the
outer edge of the spiral rather than from the center out.
Owen's believes that he and his team have deciphered enough
(15:34):
of the signs on the disk to determine that it
is some sort of prayer to of a knowan goddess
and a particularly interesting finale to its talk. He shares
the recording of a woman reading the Facets disk as
his team has decrypted it, and you can also find
this recorded audio interpretation on a website that Owens and
his colleagues have put together and will link to it
in the show notes. But it is pretty interesting to
(15:56):
hear someone speaking this language, whatever it is this communication.
Owen's conviction in his findings is quite apparent. In fact,
he's willing to bet other researchers that his interpretation is correct,
and his bet is only one euro because he's really
hoping a lot of people will challenge him and then
(16:16):
he'll wind up with a lot of euros. For each
different bet he'll collect, he'll collect one euro And that,
of course doesn't mean I mean we we talked earlier
about how many other people have put forth theories and
they all got shot down. So it does not mean that,
even though Owens is very very confident in their findings,
that the entire classics world agrees with his transliteration. So
(16:38):
in a response paper that was written by John G. Young,
who is a professor of classics at the University of Kansas,
he kind of goes through point by point what he
feels like is right in their work and what he
feels like kind of diverged and wasn't maybe so solid,
and he summarizes his points at the end of the
paper by writing, quote, I think Owen starts off well,
and in the company of many of us who have
tried to play secure phonetic I'll use on face dose
(17:01):
disc signs by working backward from linear B. But by
the time we get to cretin pictogram signs, the identifications
have become insecure, and the step to identifying face doose
discs signs now seems a leap. Owens has bridged some
of that leap, but I cannot follow him in identifying
the face those disc signs, let alone seeing in his
(17:21):
transcription true parallels to linear A words. Thomas G. Palma,
Robert M. Armstrong, Centennial Professor and Director of the Program
and A G and Scripts and Prehistory at the University
of Texas at Austin wrote of the Owens interpretation that
data are insufficient for proof or disproof. Every proposed decipherment
(17:41):
Gareth Owens is included fails the standard of probability. Yeah,
I was actually surprised watching some of these documentaries and
doing research that probability comes up a lot like linguistic
probability wasn't something I had thought a lot about. But
it's kind of like that same thing where we were
saying earlier, like the likelihood of a language having no
single syllables not so probable. It comes up in terms
(18:04):
of statistical analysis of language a lot more than I
ever would have thought about. But another critic, Brent Davis,
who is the adjunct professor at the Center for Classics
and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne, was asked his opinion,
and he said, quote in the end, owens readings are
based on a stack of unverifiable assumptions. His conclusions are
unproven and unprovable. It's not surprising then that so many
(18:27):
scholars of a g and Bronze Age scripts aren't accepting them.
Despite criticisms, Owens is steadfast and upbeat, and an email
interview with Bible History Daily, he wrote, it is perhaps
easier to criticize than to offer something new. After twenty
five years on crete, and having spent a decade doing
a PhD in linguistics on the structure of the Minoan language,
(18:49):
and after six years on the disc, I personally will
keep trying to improve our work and I will happily
hear better theories with great pleasure. Yeah, he really is
a very upbeat gent His talk is really good. If
you're like me, when you first start his ted talk,
he starts in another language and you think, oh, no,
this isn't for me. That's only the very beginning. To
stick with it, and then if you're a native English
(19:11):
speaker you'll be right on board. He switches to English
for the rest of it, but he gives the talk
in Greece, so he starts off speaking I believe Greek.
But before we talk a little bit about a whole
other controversy that surrounds this disc let's pause for another
word from one of our fabulous sponsors who keeps us
going today. Our sponsor is square Space, and Squarespace is
(19:32):
an awesome way, especially if you don't have a lot
of experience for you make your own website. It is
a very easy to use, drag and drop intuitive interface.
On top of it being extremely easy to use, they
also have twenty four seven customer support that includes email
support and live chat. They're there twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week, so you can make a really
beautiful website that's very easy to create and also has
(19:56):
lots and lots of support there if you get into
it and discover it's not quite as a easy for
you personally as you thought that it might be. One
of My favorite things about it is how easily it
scales your website so that it's going to look great
on a computer, on a phone, on a tablet. Anywhere
someone can look at your website, they're going to see
the best possible experience. I love that too, So you
(20:16):
can actually try this product risk free by going to
www dot square space dot com slash history that gives
you a fourteen day free trial with no credit card necessary.
And I will say that again, no credit card necessary
for your fourteen day free trial if you'd like it.
Once you get into it, the it costs as little
as eight dollars a month and includes a free domain
(20:39):
name if you sign up for a year. If you
use the offer code history, you get ten percent off
of your first purchase. So one more time, that is
square space dot com slash history. So there's the question
of whether this whole thing is really a hoax. The
man who discovered the face dost Dic was Luigi Pionier
(21:01):
and he was an Italian archaeologist. He found the disc
in an underground temple depository. He also believed it to
be of religious significance along with the Fais dose disc.
The Italian archaeology team that he was part of found
a clay tablet with linear a inscriptions as well as
various pieces of pottery, and recalled that this was in
the early nineteen hundreds when he made that discovery. Now,
(21:24):
as is the case with other ancient artifacts that haven't
been truly understood, all once again reference the Voytage manuscript,
which has come up as some people think it's a
hoax because otherwise somebody would have decrypted it by now.
Uh controversy again eventually enters the picture with the Fais
Dos disc as well. In two thousand eight, Jerome Eisenberg,
who is the director and owner of the Royal Athena
(21:44):
Galleries in New York and is considered an expert on
ancient art, proclaimed that the Face Dose Disc was in
fact a fraud. Eisenberg believed that Pernier, out of jealousy
that he held for other archaeologists of his time and
their accomplishments, fabricated on a publishment of his own. He's
not the first person to put forth the idea that
the disc is bologny, but he seems to be the
(22:06):
most passionate about it when it comes to really chasing
down the truth. And to support his accusation, Eisenberg pointed
out that the edges of the Face Doos disc are
far more cleanly cut than other examples of tablets from
a knowing creed, and he also cites the lack of
any credible translation as evidence that it really is likely
fake Additionally, no other artifact found on crete has the
(22:28):
same type of stamping or writing as the Face Does Disc.
One piece, the Arcolo Cory Acts found in four does
have some similar markings, but Eisenberg also believes this might
too be a fraud. So our listeners are smart and
as they listen to us just now talking about Eisenberg's claims,
(22:49):
they probably had a great idea. The Face Does Disc
is carefully kept in the Heracleon Archaeology Museum in crete.
So why does it someone just test this to see
if it's the real deal or just a long pondered fraud. Yeah,
I was like, we have isotope testing, what's going on?
The museum is not having any of that. It will
not allow the disk to be tested. Eisenberg has requested
(23:12):
the testing many times over the years, offering to pay
all the expenses that it would incur, but no dice.
They also have the acts that we mentioned a moment ago,
and they're not letting him where anyone test that either.
Eisenberg asserts that the required tests are not going to
harm the disk. At most one or two small holes
would need to be drilled in the edge of the
(23:33):
artifact to take samples so tiny that he says these
can easily be repaired so that the naked eye would
detect no anomaly. Requests to even examine the disc have
been denied on the grounds that it's an important piece
of Greek history and is unmovable. Eisenberg believes that the
museum is afraid that the disc would be revealed as
fake and that they would lose tourism because of it. Yes,
(23:55):
so it remains a mystery unless they cave an acquiesce
and let someone tell used it. I don't know. People
love hoaxes, so it might actually work out of their
benefit if it were fake. At that point, it's still
a hundred year old, really um carefully crafted hoax, so
it would be interesting. Yeah, there was. This is kind
of a footnote. It's such a weird thing, and I found, uh,
(24:16):
just one reference to it, but I wanted to mention it.
There was allegedly a smaller copy of the disc that
was found in Russia in that raised some other hoax questions,
but that version has vanished without a trace. Uh several
years after people started raising their eyebrows about it, it
just kind of went underground and has never been seen
or heard of again, so we don't have that for comparison.
(24:39):
We don't have. This whole thing just makes me wonder
if if hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of years
from now, archaeologists are going to find some kind of
junkie things somebody bought an urban outfitters that has like
fake hopie designs on it or something, and then spend
hundreds of years trying to decode it when really it
(25:00):
is cheap stuff that appropriated another culture and then was
sold in a retail estapament. Yeah. I wonder similar things
as well. I mean I had that moment of what
if it's just some kids doodle that his parents. What
I don't we don't know? What if this was a
prop that I don't know? Right? Yeah, we have No.
(25:24):
There's just enough similarities, you know, and valid interpretive elements
to it are valid to be interpreted elements to it
that it seems like it could be grounded there. But
people have also pointed out that it's just far enough
off that it supports the hoax theory, and that it's
just good enough to represent pretty closely what we knew
(25:45):
about Minoan creets in the early nineteen hundreds. So so
we don't know, and hopefully we'll learn more at some point.
I always like some fresh learning before I think of
some more wild conjecture. Do you have some ser mail
for us? I do. I have a couple of different pieces. Uh,
it's a listener male stravaganza over here. First, I have
(26:06):
a little correction, because sometimes I'm a dufas. Uh. When
we had read in a previous episode a time capsule email. Uh.
During our listener mail segment, we were talking about Andy
Warhol and those time capsules, and I incorrectly attributed Warhol's
death to Valorie Salani's because my brain cannot be trusted.
She did shoot him. He died much later because she
(26:27):
shot him, and all I could hear was like lou
Reid singing about it in my head, and I just
my brain misfired. I apologize. I feel very, very embarrassed,
because I really do love Warhol. It did a lot
of papers on him when I was younger. But it
doesn't always stick with you. It's like a foreign language
sometimes if you're not practicing it, it just gets rusty.
And then I have several short listener males all about
(26:48):
our recent episode on Peanut butter because, like I said,
I love it talk about it a lot. So The
first one is from our listener Perry, who wanted to
recommend the dish for peanut butter lovers. He says, high, ladies,
I'm sitting here at work listening to today's podcast on
peanut butter, and I thought I'd take the time to
recommend the strangest and most delicious peanut butter dish I
have ever had the pleasure of eating. A few years ago,
(27:08):
my younger sister spent a semester abroad in Ghana, and
when she returned home, she couldn't wait to take me
to the nearest authentic Ghanaian food restaurant we could find.
She was so excited for me to try one dish,
in particular because of my love for its star ingredient,
which is peanut butter. Apparently peanut butter is revered in Ghana.
Who knew? I highly recommend booking it to the nearest
place you can find to try a plate of peanut
(27:30):
butter soup and fufu, which is a dish served with
sticky rice that you roll into balls and dip with
your hands into the chicken and peanut butter soup. Although
it may sound like a strange combination for peanut butter
lovers like ourselves, it is just about the tastiest dish ever. Perry,
I am glad to report that I have had fufuu
and I agree it's so delicious. I think I had
it the first time when I was in Disney World.
(27:51):
There is a really there are a couple of really
yummy African restaurants at and Wokingham Lodge. At one point,
one of the chef's team out and we were talking
because that's my favorite ride is food and uh we
were talking about the Foo Foo and he brought me
some sticky rice and we played in eight together, which
was delicious and it has now become one of my
big favorites. Uh. The next one is from our listener Penny,
(28:12):
and she is also writing about it. Uh. She does
photo editing in a fashion company, which sounds so cool
to me. Penny sent us pictures. Uh. She says. When
I was a young girl, we lived with my grandmother
in Ohio during every summer and winter vacation. She had
a large old house with a large basement that I
was always too frightened to go down into. One evening,
I chased a firefly down into the basement and ended
(28:33):
up staring at shelves upon shelves of canned goods and
boxes of clothes and random things. I remembered seeing large
cans of peanut butter sitting right on the shelf at
eye level that were bigger than my head. I was
too scared to venture fourth, and I ran back upstairs.
I remember from that day fourth, I thought that every
time I asked for a peanut butter sandwich, that the
peanut butter came from one of those cans. Now that
(28:54):
I'm older and my grandmother has passed, I visited her home,
but it's since been cleared out. I asked my uncle
about all that stuff I saw, and he said that
during the Great Depression, my grandmother was expected to take
care of her younger siblings as she was the eldest,
and the family basically survived on peanut butter. The Great
Depression did something to people, including turning my grandmother into
a hordor of food and clothing from Goodwill. She was
(29:15):
convinced the next depression and economic collapse was right around
the corner, and she stalked up on everything determined to
never go hungry by always having peanut butter nearby, And
even now I always have at least three peanut butter
jars in my house just in case I can't. I
can't fault the idea of keep the peanut butter on
hand for a variety of reasons, except that I can't
(29:36):
because I eat it all much too quickly, Like when
the apocalypse comes and Bride's like, where's all that food
we bought, I'll be like, in my tummy, it's gone. Uh.
And the last one is from our listener, Liam, and
it made me laugh so hard. It came latest last
night while I was doing some work, and I was
cackling so much that it frightened my cats us. Recently,
when listening to the fascinating history of peanut butter, my
(29:59):
ears pricked up when I heard you mentioned Sanitas Food
Company because of a funny thing I've noticed here in Australia.
And I left out the part earlier where Liam is
an American from Boston and he's currently living in Sydney.
He said, peanut butter is one of many surprising things
that Ozzie's does designate as quote very American. I, of
course loved this stuff, and I was cracked up when
I found a jar of peanut butter at my local
(30:20):
grocery store with a picture pun of a peanut doing
crunches to indicate that it was crunchy peanut butter. He
sent us a picture. It is so funny, I literally
could not stop laughing. He says, it doesn't take much
to make me laugh. But when I posted the photo
on Facebook, my sister pointed out the funny name of
the company that made the peanut butter, which is Sanitarium.
And then he made the connection to John Harvey Kellogg
(30:42):
in the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and so I pointed him
to that episode. But I just wanted to share the
idea that crunchy peanut butter can be represented by a
peanut exercise is ABS. That's like the best thing ever.
I also want you you expressed your horror that I
do not care for crunchy peanut butter. However, on the
(31:05):
fourth of July, we had a an entire beach day,
which was great, and we had sandwiches for lunch with
sandwich provisions that friends had brought, and they had like
a crunchy peanut butter and it was delicious. I had
it and within a peanut butter and banana sandwich. So
I think perhaps either my tastes have changed, which is true.
(31:26):
There's other stuff that was I hated when I was
a child that I like now, or I was just
eating the wrong crunchy peanut butter. Well, I was gonna say.
I developed a theory after we were doing the the
q A listen on that episode that because you had
mentioned the big vat peanut butter that had to be stirred,
sometimes because of the stirring and the peat chunky peanuts
(31:50):
in it, they can break up a little bit and
you get almost a grainy texture, and that might be
the problem that you had had previously, like it gets
it gets a little weird in your mouth, and that
some of the natural the ones that you have to
stir when there's crunchy, but so much better now than
they were in Billy Are. I remember we had a
friend who had We used to say she had hippie parents.
(32:11):
It's really not appropriate to say, but in the seventies
that's what my parents said about her parents, and they
had that kind of peanut butter, and I always remember
being like, yeah, this is difficult to consume and it
tore my bread. There are there are a lot of
food options that that my like the whole grain pasta
options that exist now are also so much better than
in the slate seventies. Anyway, that's off topic food science.
(32:35):
If you would like the right to us about crazy
uh legumes, doing exercises on anistors of food or any
other thing, you can do that at history find at
at housto works dot com. You can also connect with
us at Facebook dot com, slash mist in History, on Twitter,
at misst in history, at miss in history dot tumbler
dot com, on pinterest dot com, slash mist in History,
and at mist in History dot spredsher dot com. If
(32:57):
you would like to purchase mist in History UH shirts
and phone cases and tope bags and other wackadoodle items. UH.
If you would like to learn a little bit more
about ancient Greece, you can go to our parents site
how stuff Works, and you can pay then Greece and
they search barring. You would get all kinds of information
about Greece through the ages. You would like to come
and visit us at miss in history dot com. You
(33:19):
can do that and find all of our back episodes
and show notes for all of the episodes since Tracy
and I have been hosts, as well as the occasional
other delightful goodie or blog post, so we encourage you
to do that. Come see us on the web at
how to work dot com and missment history dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
(33:41):
it has to works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class fun stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Polly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, it's been
a little while since we've had a history mystery, and
I love them so much. I feel like I always
have to restrain myself from doing a bunch of them.
(00:21):
And history mystery is just fun to say. Indeed, it
doesn't like a little rhyme. So we're gonna talk about
one today. And this one is an artifact that's been
studied for more than a hundred years. Although some have
claimed to figure it out, there's really no consensus about it.
So we're gonna be talking about Minoan crete and the
face does disc which was unearthed in And this is
an artifact which features symbols that, like the Voyage Manuscript,
(00:45):
have really puzzled researchers for decades. But like I said,
no one has been able to agree on what it is,
although there's some people pretty vehement, especially in recent times,
that they have got this thing figured out. So create
of course, it's in the eastern Mediterranean. See the island
is about two hundred kilometers or a hundred and twenty
four miles across east to west. It ranges from twelve
(01:06):
to fifty eight kilometers or seven and a half to
thirty six miles north to south. Manollan's often credited as
the first European civilization, had a decentralized sort of culture
which did a pretty brisk export business. So timber, food, olive, oil, wool,
and die were among the many goods that Creates sold
or traded, and their most popular imports were precious metals,
(01:30):
precious stones, and ivory. Minoan culture had contact with Egypt, Mesopotamia,
and Phoenicia, and they were constantly influenced a lot by
all of those cultures. If you've listened to our episode
on the Phoenician alphabet, you may recall that part of
the development of that alphabet came to the need of
creating this unified system of communication for trading with all
(01:50):
these various Mediterranean cultures. And we know that crete was
inhabited as early as the seventh millennium b C, although
it wasn't until after the fifth millennium BC that we
really start to see pottery in the timeline, and that
sort of marks the beginning of the Manoan civilization. There
are a couple of different ways that the Minoan civilization
has divided into periods. One method is based on this
(02:13):
pottery and marks changes in the style of pottery. This
divides it as the Early period dating from three thousand
to twenty one d b C, the Middle period from
twenty one DUDE, and a late period dating from fifteen
hundred to eleven hundred BC. And there's an alternative way
of looking at the timeline of Minoan civilization and breaking
(02:35):
it up, and that's based sort of on architecture. Is
its linked to the culture, and this separates it into
four segments. So this breaks Minoan crete into a pre
palatial period from twenty hundred to nineteen hundred BC, a
proto palatial period from nineteen hundred to seventeen hundred b C,
a neo palatial period from seventeen hundred to fourteen hundred
(02:57):
b C, and a post palatial period from fourteen hundred
to eleven fifty b C. The Facets disc was discovered
in nineteen o eight. It was found on crete in
what's called the Old Palace of Manoan face Does. The disc,
made of fired clay, has been dated to eighteen fifty
to fifteen, with an estimate of about seventeen hundred BC
(03:20):
as the more exact date. This means it pre dates
the time that the Phoenicians would have been developing their alphabet.
It also means it falls into the Middle Minoan period
if you're looking at the pottery based breakdown of the timeline,
and it sort of straddles the proto palatial and neo
palatial uh periods. On the alternate timeline circuit two thousand
(03:41):
b c E. In the crossover period between the pre
palatial and proto palatial periods, the political system shifted and
Minoan create became more centralized around a king. Remember we
had said earlier it was decentralized prior to this, and
this is also when these palaces became part of the
landscape of crete. They served a sort of both centers
of government and community. While there was a great deal
(04:04):
of upheaval around the shift from a decentralized culture the
one that was focused on a central figure, things seem
to settle into a peaceful period. Not long afterward, some event,
and we don't know exactly what it was, if it
was a natural disaster along the lines of an earthquake,
or if Minoan creed was invaded, but some event destroyed
(04:24):
these palaces that had become administrative centers, and this destruction
and the rebuilding of the lost palaces mark the transition
to the neo palatial period, and this neo palatial period
is also considered the time when Minoan culture was at
its apex. Next we will talk about this disk in
more detail, but first let's have a break to talk
about one of the awesome sponsors who make this show possible.
(04:47):
So most people will do whatever it takes to make
sure that their small business runs efficiently, and that means
sometimes that that involves constant trips to the post office,
but that can actually get in the way of efficiency.
So as stamps dot Com, you will be able to
spend less time at the post office and more time
actually growing your business. Stamps dot Com makes mailing and
shipping super easy. You just use your own computer and
(05:07):
your printer to purchase and print official US postage and
that's gonna work for any letter and any package that
you need to send. Stamps dot Com basically does all
of the thinking for you. So you have a digital
scale that's going to calculate the exact postage that you
need and it will actually help you decide on the
best class of mail you need to choose based on
your needs. So join more than five hundred thousand small
(05:28):
businesses that you stamps dot com and never worry about
going to the post office again. Right now, you can
use our promo code, which is stuff for a special
offer and that gets you a no risk trial plus
a one dollar bonus offer that includes a digital scale
and up to fifty five dollars worth of free postage.
So don't wait, go to stamps dot com. But before
you do anything else, click on the microphone at the
(05:50):
top of the home page and type in stuff that's
stamps dot com and enter stuff. So now to talk
about the actual disc, now that we've kind of set
up where it would have fallen in the timeline in
terms of Minoa Greek culture, the disc itself is pretty small.
The diameter ranges from fifteen point eight to sixteen point
five centimeters, which is six point two to six point
(06:11):
five inches, depending on where that diameter measurement is taken. Uh,
this is one of those things. I have seen pictures
of it at various points through the years, and in
my head it was always so much bigger than that.
That then, when I was working on research for this,
I think it's something. Yeah, it's like when we did
the episode on the ant together a device which I
similarly thought was quite large until you were like, no,
it's like little she boxed little. Uh. And the thickness
(06:34):
of this disc ranges from one point six to two
point one centimeters, so that's about point six to point
eight inches in thickness. There's a spiral pattern of more
than two hundred and forty images on the disc, featuring
forty five different symbols. In the very center of Side
A is what looks like a simple flower, and then
the symbols spiral out from there in groups that range
(06:56):
from two to seven in number. There are vertical lines
that set break these groups. Side B has a symbol
that's made of wavy lines and sort of a rounded
triangular shape at the center. Yeah, And as Tracy just said,
which was in my notes, it kind of the there's
an image in the center and then it sort of
spirals out from there. But there are actually two different
(07:17):
theories about how this spiraling really works in which direction
it's supposed to go. So one approach points out that
the symbols are oriented to the right, so faces that
are in profile, there's one that's often called the punk
and it looks like a dude to the mohawk UH,
and it looks to the right. And figures that appear
to be walking or in motion also look like they're
(07:38):
walking to the right. And this has led some scholars
to the conclusion that the disk should be read uh
spiraling outward from left to right. This is also supported
by a sort of erupt end point in the spiral,
where at the very end where the last loop kind
of meets up with the previous one, there's a hard
vertical line that's punctuated with several dots. It looks like
(08:00):
a very final sort of symbol to some people. The
opposite reading direction, which goes from right to left and
spirals inward, is supported by the fact that some symbols
occasionally overlap the symbols on their right. This indicates that
the stamping was done from right to left. Yeah, so
just like you wouldn't write a word with the last
(08:21):
letter first and then go backwards most people, maybe some
people learn to write backwards, but their ideas that they
wouldn't be overlapping in that way, because normally you would
write it the way it would be uh, beginning to end,
So that suggests that it goes that way. And the
symbols we've mentioned that they were stamped, they appear to
(08:41):
have been stamped in the clay before firing. And what's
sort of interesting is that, uh, these stamps don't appear
to repeat even when they're very similar to one another,
Like it's the same punk that reappears, but it doesn't
look quite the same. So there may have been more
than one stamp for that. Uh. So, Yeah, symbols that
are almost identical don't look like they were made with
the same stamp. And there are a few positions in
(09:02):
the clay uh that look like it was stamped and
then maybe reworked, kind of smoothed out almost to erase
the stamp, and then re stamped prior to firing. Unlike
the symbols, the spiral line from the center out and
the lines that break up the segments of the symbols
look like they were carved into the disk by hand
rather than stamped. Dashes and dots also appear in some
(09:24):
of the symbol groupings. These elements, particularly the dashes, may
have some kind of significance, or they may have been
accidentally imprinted as the disc was being made. Yeah, they
they're not consistent in where they appear, like in some
cases they appear near the beginning of each UH segment,
but they don't do that to all the segments. So
we're not sure, and there is never, as we've said before,
(09:46):
been a consensus among researchers and scholars. So what these
symbols represent. Some are obvious pictograms, they look like humans
like I talked about the punk, they look like fish
or flowers, while others of them are more abstract, kind
of like with as you mentioned earlier, that the center
point on side B is like wavy lines in this
triangle that's got kind of rounded edges because of this mix.
(10:07):
It's clearly not specifically just a pictograph item, but there
are too many different symbols for it to likely be
an alphabet. So it's possible that the symbols represents syllables
that's a very popular approach to analysis, and that each
segment of symbols creates a single word. But the syllabary
theory has problems as well. For one thing, if the
(10:28):
symbols on the face dose disc formed a syllabary language,
there would be a more even distribution of the symbols.
There are also no one syllable words and very few
to syllable syllable words present if the disc is interpreted
this way, which would be pretty unusual for a language. Yeah,
it's one of those things whereas I was researching and
(10:48):
saw that, I'm like, is that And then I'm looking
at my own typing and I'm like, half of these
words have only one or two syllables. Well, there, I
think there are languages that have on average longer words
but still generally have shorter words. Also, Yeah, for most languages,
shorter words to make up sort of the bulk of
the language, and then you get compound words that are
(11:09):
like mixes of the shorter words. Right. So it is
also possible that this disc is a mix of communication forms.
It could be a combination of pictogram and syllabary, and
we're going to talk a little bit more about why
that's a possibility in just a moment. Many theories have
emerged into what this disc actually is, although there's no
real evidence for any of them. It's been suggested that
(11:30):
it's a letter of fertility ritual some form of musical notation,
a list of royalty, a religious hymn, a spell, a
geometry theorem. It goes on and on and on and
on and on. But without similar discs to reference against,
these are all really just stabs in the dark. Yeah.
But the one thing that people mostly do agree on,
(11:51):
and this was not always the case, is that it
is pretty commonly believed and accepted that the disc did
in fact originate on crete and wasn't created somewhere else
and then brought there. So many attempts have been made
to decrypt this disc through the years. In nine five,
Jean Faccuonau of Luxembourg believed that the language was a
(12:11):
pre Greek syllabic form of writing employed by a proto
Ionian culture. His translation of the disc tells the story
of the rain and eventual passing of a king. Most
fais does disc scholars rejected this interpretation. However, there have
been other interpretations put forth through the years, but all
of them have had a similar fate in the classics community. Yeah,
(12:34):
they've all really been dismissed pretty readily. But there is
a very recent interpretation theory that is now being discussed,
and this was introduced just last year. So in May
of Minoan language and classic scholar Gareth Owens gave a
tedex talk about his work with the fasts disc. He
(12:57):
and other researchers worked together with their not knowledge of
the writing forms Manohan linear A, Minoan linear B, and
cretent pictographic hiero hieroglyphic language over the course of six
years to assign syllables to the pictograms on the disc.
Cretent pictographic script was in use circa nineteen fifty to
(13:19):
seventeen hundred b c E. And the symbols used in
this writing form are pretty clearly drawn from real objects.
So there's a lot of animals and humans and plant
life representation. So for context on these writing forms that
we just mentioned, Cretan pictographic script was in use circa
nineteen fifty and nineteen or seventeen hundred b c E.
(13:40):
And the symbols used in this writing form are pretty
clearly drawn from real objects such as animals and humans
and plant life. Linear A is believed to have been
used on crete from about eighteen fifty to fourteen hundred BC.
It's a syllabic language, and while we know that some
of the phonetics represented by most of the symbols. We
don't really know the language of linear A. Linear A
(14:03):
has been found on artifacts and crete as well as
the a g and islands. And you probably noticed an
overlap as we were just talking about those two in
the times of use, when Cretan pictograph and linear a,
we're both being used. And we don't know why both
the more primitive and the more advanced writing forms were
being used concurrently for so long, but that could somehow
(14:26):
explain the idea that the writing on the disc is
a combination of different forms, as a sort of linguistic
evolution snapshot. Linear B is an adaptation of linear A.
It's believed that this was a version of the writing
form UH and that it contains more than nineties signs.
The script was used for financial records and was used
in palaces of many of continental Greece's cities. Linear B
(14:50):
is considered incredibly important linguistically because vestiges of this dialect
remain in evidence from Homer's writings. Yeah, it really didn't
have a long lasting influence, and it's common when interpreting
something like the face does disc for classicists and researchers
to work backward from linear B to linear AID to
create and pictogram writing. When they're working to interpret these
(15:13):
texts and using this so called epigraphic continuity, which is
one of the things that Owen's calls it, he's developed
his interpretation of the Facets disk, and Owen's reading of
the disc also suggests reading it inwards, starting at the
outer edge of the spiral rather than from the center out.
Owen's believes that he and his team have deciphered enough
(15:34):
of the signs on the disk to determine that it
is some sort of prayer to of a knowan goddess
and a particularly interesting finale to its talk. He shares
the recording of a woman reading the Facets disk as
his team has decrypted it, and you can also find
this recorded audio interpretation on a website that Owens and
his colleagues have put together and will link to it
in the show notes. But it is pretty interesting to
(15:56):
hear someone speaking this language, whatever it is this communication.
Owen's conviction in his findings is quite apparent. In fact,
he's willing to bet other researchers that his interpretation is correct,
and his bet is only one euro because he's really
hoping a lot of people will challenge him and then
(16:16):
he'll wind up with a lot of euros. For each
different bet he'll collect, he'll collect one euro And that,
of course doesn't mean I mean we we talked earlier
about how many other people have put forth theories and
they all got shot down. So it does not mean that,
even though Owens is very very confident in their findings,
that the entire classics world agrees with his transliteration. So
(16:38):
in a response paper that was written by John G. Young,
who is a professor of classics at the University of Kansas,
he kind of goes through point by point what he
feels like is right in their work and what he
feels like kind of diverged and wasn't maybe so solid,
and he summarizes his points at the end of the
paper by writing, quote, I think Owen starts off well,
and in the company of many of us who have
tried to play secure phonetic I'll use on face dose
(17:01):
disc signs by working backward from linear B. But by
the time we get to cretin pictogram signs, the identifications
have become insecure, and the step to identifying face doose
discs signs now seems a leap. Owens has bridged some
of that leap, but I cannot follow him in identifying
the face those disc signs, let alone seeing in his
(17:21):
transcription true parallels to linear A words. Thomas G. Palma,
Robert M. Armstrong, Centennial Professor and Director of the Program
and A G and Scripts and Prehistory at the University
of Texas at Austin wrote of the Owens interpretation that
data are insufficient for proof or disproof. Every proposed decipherment
(17:41):
Gareth Owens is included fails the standard of probability. Yeah,
I was actually surprised watching some of these documentaries and
doing research that probability comes up a lot like linguistic
probability wasn't something I had thought a lot about. But
it's kind of like that same thing where we were
saying earlier, like the likelihood of a language having no
single syllables not so probable. It comes up in terms
(18:04):
of statistical analysis of language a lot more than I
ever would have thought about. But another critic, Brent Davis,
who is the adjunct professor at the Center for Classics
and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne, was asked his opinion,
and he said, quote in the end, owens readings are
based on a stack of unverifiable assumptions. His conclusions are
unproven and unprovable. It's not surprising then that so many
(18:27):
scholars of a g and Bronze Age scripts aren't accepting them.
Despite criticisms, Owens is steadfast and upbeat, and an email
interview with Bible History Daily, he wrote, it is perhaps
easier to criticize than to offer something new. After twenty
five years on crete, and having spent a decade doing
a PhD in linguistics on the structure of the Minoan language,
(18:49):
and after six years on the disc, I personally will
keep trying to improve our work and I will happily
hear better theories with great pleasure. Yeah, he really is
a very upbeat gent His talk is really good. If
you're like me, when you first start his ted talk,
he starts in another language and you think, oh, no,
this isn't for me. That's only the very beginning. To
stick with it, and then if you're a native English
(19:11):
speaker you'll be right on board. He switches to English
for the rest of it, but he gives the talk
in Greece, so he starts off speaking I believe Greek.
But before we talk a little bit about a whole
other controversy that surrounds this disc let's pause for another
word from one of our fabulous sponsors who keeps us
going today. Our sponsor is square Space, and Squarespace is
(19:32):
an awesome way, especially if you don't have a lot
of experience for you make your own website. It is
a very easy to use, drag and drop intuitive interface.
On top of it being extremely easy to use, they
also have twenty four seven customer support that includes email
support and live chat. They're there twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week, so you can make a really
beautiful website that's very easy to create and also has
(19:56):
lots and lots of support there if you get into
it and discover it's not quite as a easy for
you personally as you thought that it might be. One
of My favorite things about it is how easily it
scales your website so that it's going to look great
on a computer, on a phone, on a tablet. Anywhere
someone can look at your website, they're going to see
the best possible experience. I love that too, So you
(20:16):
can actually try this product risk free by going to
www dot square space dot com slash history that gives
you a fourteen day free trial with no credit card necessary.
And I will say that again, no credit card necessary
for your fourteen day free trial if you'd like it.
Once you get into it, the it costs as little
as eight dollars a month and includes a free domain
(20:39):
name if you sign up for a year. If you
use the offer code history, you get ten percent off
of your first purchase. So one more time, that is
square space dot com slash history. So there's the question
of whether this whole thing is really a hoax. The
man who discovered the face dost Dic was Luigi Pionier
(21:01):
and he was an Italian archaeologist. He found the disc
in an underground temple depository. He also believed it to
be of religious significance along with the Fais dose disc.
The Italian archaeology team that he was part of found
a clay tablet with linear a inscriptions as well as
various pieces of pottery, and recalled that this was in
the early nineteen hundreds when he made that discovery. Now,
(21:24):
as is the case with other ancient artifacts that haven't
been truly understood, all once again reference the Voytage manuscript,
which has come up as some people think it's a
hoax because otherwise somebody would have decrypted it by now.
Uh controversy again eventually enters the picture with the Fais
Dos disc as well. In two thousand eight, Jerome Eisenberg,
who is the director and owner of the Royal Athena
(21:44):
Galleries in New York and is considered an expert on
ancient art, proclaimed that the Face Dose Disc was in
fact a fraud. Eisenberg believed that Pernier, out of jealousy
that he held for other archaeologists of his time and
their accomplishments, fabricated on a publishment of his own. He's
not the first person to put forth the idea that
the disc is bologny, but he seems to be the
(22:06):
most passionate about it when it comes to really chasing
down the truth. And to support his accusation, Eisenberg pointed
out that the edges of the Face Doos disc are
far more cleanly cut than other examples of tablets from
a knowing creed, and he also cites the lack of
any credible translation as evidence that it really is likely
fake Additionally, no other artifact found on crete has the
(22:28):
same type of stamping or writing as the Face Does Disc.
One piece, the Arcolo Cory Acts found in four does
have some similar markings, but Eisenberg also believes this might
too be a fraud. So our listeners are smart and
as they listen to us just now talking about Eisenberg's claims,
(22:49):
they probably had a great idea. The Face Does Disc
is carefully kept in the Heracleon Archaeology Museum in crete.
So why does it someone just test this to see
if it's the real deal or just a long pondered fraud. Yeah,
I was like, we have isotope testing, what's going on?
The museum is not having any of that. It will
not allow the disk to be tested. Eisenberg has requested
(23:12):
the testing many times over the years, offering to pay
all the expenses that it would incur, but no dice.
They also have the acts that we mentioned a moment ago,
and they're not letting him where anyone test that either.
Eisenberg asserts that the required tests are not going to
harm the disk. At most one or two small holes
would need to be drilled in the edge of the
(23:33):
artifact to take samples so tiny that he says these
can easily be repaired so that the naked eye would
detect no anomaly. Requests to even examine the disc have
been denied on the grounds that it's an important piece
of Greek history and is unmovable. Eisenberg believes that the
museum is afraid that the disc would be revealed as
fake and that they would lose tourism because of it. Yes,
(23:55):
so it remains a mystery unless they cave an acquiesce
and let someone tell used it. I don't know. People
love hoaxes, so it might actually work out of their
benefit if it were fake. At that point, it's still
a hundred year old, really um carefully crafted hoax, so
it would be interesting. Yeah, there was. This is kind
of a footnote. It's such a weird thing, and I found, uh,
(24:16):
just one reference to it, but I wanted to mention it.
There was allegedly a smaller copy of the disc that
was found in Russia in that raised some other hoax questions,
but that version has vanished without a trace. Uh several
years after people started raising their eyebrows about it, it
just kind of went underground and has never been seen
or heard of again, so we don't have that for comparison.
(24:39):
We don't have. This whole thing just makes me wonder
if if hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of years
from now, archaeologists are going to find some kind of
junkie things somebody bought an urban outfitters that has like
fake hopie designs on it or something, and then spend
hundreds of years trying to decode it when really it
(25:00):
is cheap stuff that appropriated another culture and then was
sold in a retail estapament. Yeah. I wonder similar things
as well. I mean I had that moment of what
if it's just some kids doodle that his parents. What
I don't we don't know? What if this was a
prop that I don't know? Right? Yeah, we have No.
(25:24):
There's just enough similarities, you know, and valid interpretive elements
to it are valid to be interpreted elements to it
that it seems like it could be grounded there. But
people have also pointed out that it's just far enough
off that it supports the hoax theory, and that it's
just good enough to represent pretty closely what we knew
(25:45):
about Minoan creets in the early nineteen hundreds. So so
we don't know, and hopefully we'll learn more at some point.
I always like some fresh learning before I think of
some more wild conjecture. Do you have some ser mail
for us? I do. I have a couple of different pieces. Uh,
it's a listener male stravaganza over here. First, I have
(26:06):
a little correction, because sometimes I'm a dufas. Uh. When
we had read in a previous episode a time capsule email. Uh.
During our listener mail segment, we were talking about Andy
Warhol and those time capsules, and I incorrectly attributed Warhol's
death to Valorie Salani's because my brain cannot be trusted.
She did shoot him. He died much later because she
(26:27):
shot him, and all I could hear was like lou
Reid singing about it in my head, and I just
my brain misfired. I apologize. I feel very, very embarrassed,
because I really do love Warhol. It did a lot
of papers on him when I was younger. But it
doesn't always stick with you. It's like a foreign language
sometimes if you're not practicing it, it just gets rusty.
And then I have several short listener males all about
(26:48):
our recent episode on Peanut butter because, like I said,
I love it talk about it a lot. So The
first one is from our listener Perry, who wanted to
recommend the dish for peanut butter lovers. He says, high, ladies,
I'm sitting here at work listening to today's podcast on
peanut butter, and I thought I'd take the time to
recommend the strangest and most delicious peanut butter dish I
have ever had the pleasure of eating. A few years ago,
(27:08):
my younger sister spent a semester abroad in Ghana, and
when she returned home, she couldn't wait to take me
to the nearest authentic Ghanaian food restaurant we could find.
She was so excited for me to try one dish,
in particular because of my love for its star ingredient,
which is peanut butter. Apparently peanut butter is revered in Ghana.
Who knew? I highly recommend booking it to the nearest
place you can find to try a plate of peanut
(27:30):
butter soup and fufu, which is a dish served with
sticky rice that you roll into balls and dip with
your hands into the chicken and peanut butter soup. Although
it may sound like a strange combination for peanut butter
lovers like ourselves, it is just about the tastiest dish ever. Perry,
I am glad to report that I have had fufuu
and I agree it's so delicious. I think I had
it the first time when I was in Disney World.
(27:51):
There is a really there are a couple of really
yummy African restaurants at and Wokingham Lodge. At one point,
one of the chef's team out and we were talking
because that's my favorite ride is food and uh we
were talking about the Foo Foo and he brought me
some sticky rice and we played in eight together, which
was delicious and it has now become one of my
big favorites. Uh. The next one is from our listener Penny,
(28:12):
and she is also writing about it. Uh. She does
photo editing in a fashion company, which sounds so cool
to me. Penny sent us pictures. Uh. She says. When
I was a young girl, we lived with my grandmother
in Ohio during every summer and winter vacation. She had
a large old house with a large basement that I
was always too frightened to go down into. One evening,
I chased a firefly down into the basement and ended
(28:33):
up staring at shelves upon shelves of canned goods and
boxes of clothes and random things. I remembered seeing large
cans of peanut butter sitting right on the shelf at
eye level that were bigger than my head. I was
too scared to venture fourth, and I ran back upstairs.
I remember from that day fourth, I thought that every
time I asked for a peanut butter sandwich, that the
peanut butter came from one of those cans. Now that
(28:54):
I'm older and my grandmother has passed, I visited her home,
but it's since been cleared out. I asked my uncle
about all that stuff I saw, and he said that
during the Great Depression, my grandmother was expected to take
care of her younger siblings as she was the eldest,
and the family basically survived on peanut butter. The Great
Depression did something to people, including turning my grandmother into
a hordor of food and clothing from Goodwill. She was
(29:15):
convinced the next depression and economic collapse was right around
the corner, and she stalked up on everything determined to
never go hungry by always having peanut butter nearby, And
even now I always have at least three peanut butter
jars in my house just in case I can't. I
can't fault the idea of keep the peanut butter on
hand for a variety of reasons, except that I can't
(29:36):
because I eat it all much too quickly, Like when
the apocalypse comes and Bride's like, where's all that food
we bought, I'll be like, in my tummy, it's gone. Uh.
And the last one is from our listener, Liam, and
it made me laugh so hard. It came latest last
night while I was doing some work, and I was
cackling so much that it frightened my cats us. Recently,
when listening to the fascinating history of peanut butter, my
(29:59):
ears pricked up when I heard you mentioned Sanitas Food
Company because of a funny thing I've noticed here in Australia.
And I left out the part earlier where Liam is
an American from Boston and he's currently living in Sydney.
He said, peanut butter is one of many surprising things
that Ozzie's does designate as quote very American. I, of
course loved this stuff, and I was cracked up when
I found a jar of peanut butter at my local
(30:20):
grocery store with a picture pun of a peanut doing
crunches to indicate that it was crunchy peanut butter. He
sent us a picture. It is so funny, I literally
could not stop laughing. He says, it doesn't take much
to make me laugh. But when I posted the photo
on Facebook, my sister pointed out the funny name of
the company that made the peanut butter, which is Sanitarium.
And then he made the connection to John Harvey Kellogg
(30:42):
in the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and so I pointed him
to that episode. But I just wanted to share the
idea that crunchy peanut butter can be represented by a
peanut exercise is ABS. That's like the best thing ever.
I also want you you expressed your horror that I
do not care for crunchy peanut butter. However, on the
(31:05):
fourth of July, we had a an entire beach day,
which was great, and we had sandwiches for lunch with
sandwich provisions that friends had brought, and they had like
a crunchy peanut butter and it was delicious. I had
it and within a peanut butter and banana sandwich. So
I think perhaps either my tastes have changed, which is true.
(31:26):
There's other stuff that was I hated when I was
a child that I like now, or I was just
eating the wrong crunchy peanut butter. Well, I was gonna say.
I developed a theory after we were doing the the
q A listen on that episode that because you had
mentioned the big vat peanut butter that had to be stirred,
sometimes because of the stirring and the peat chunky peanuts
(31:50):
in it, they can break up a little bit and
you get almost a grainy texture, and that might be
the problem that you had had previously, like it gets
it gets a little weird in your mouth, and that
some of the natural the ones that you have to
stir when there's crunchy, but so much better now than
they were in Billy Are. I remember we had a
friend who had We used to say she had hippie parents.
(32:11):
It's really not appropriate to say, but in the seventies
that's what my parents said about her parents, and they
had that kind of peanut butter, and I always remember
being like, yeah, this is difficult to consume and it
tore my bread. There are there are a lot of
food options that that my like the whole grain pasta
options that exist now are also so much better than
in the slate seventies. Anyway, that's off topic food science.
(32:35):
If you would like the right to us about crazy
uh legumes, doing exercises on anistors of food or any
other thing, you can do that at history find at
at housto works dot com. You can also connect with
us at Facebook dot com, slash mist in History, on Twitter,
at misst in history, at miss in history dot tumbler
dot com, on pinterest dot com, slash mist in History,
and at mist in History dot spredsher dot com. If
(32:57):
you would like to purchase mist in History UH shirts
and phone cases and tope bags and other wackadoodle items. UH.
If you would like to learn a little bit more
about ancient Greece, you can go to our parents site
how stuff Works, and you can pay then Greece and
they search barring. You would get all kinds of information
about Greece through the ages. You would like to come
and visit us at miss in history dot com. You
(33:19):
can do that and find all of our back episodes
and show notes for all of the episodes since Tracy
and I have been hosts, as well as the occasional
other delightful goodie or blog post, so we encourage you
to do that. Come see us on the web at
how to work dot com and missment history dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
(33:41):
it has to works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.