Detailed Thoughts About The Developing Of Our Alphabet

The PHAISTOS DISC And The Alphabet

Are We Able To See Archetypes Of Concurrent Letters In Some Of The Pictures Of The Phaistos Disc?

This seems to be a quite paradox question - didn't the alphabet (majuscule) come to existence only some centuries after the Discos, the lower-case alphabet (minuscule) initial in the early Middle Ages?

But there are some questions open regarding the alphabet:

1. How did it come into existence?
2. Why are there two systems, if one would be completely sufficient?
3. Why do we write proper nouns in capital letters?
4. Why is the minuscule Sigma, and only it, written in two different shapes?
5. Why are some minuscules so completely different to the corresponding majuscles, from which they ought to be derived?

Since more than one century after the discovery of this clay disc written with stamed pictures (1908) a huge number of scientists and amateurs have tried to disclose the secret of the Disc, up to now without a satisfying result.

Success promises only the way via the alphabet, which is vehemently objected by the scientists But the language itself endorses it. The double meaning of the word „paint/write” means nothing else than that the first letters were pictures.

The process of writing with pictures is simple in principle: When writing a certain phoneme one searches for a general known word that starts with that phoneme, draws it, and the picture works as the required letter. Even double phonemes can be written like this. At the beginning the scripture is still oriented at the practice and without a fixed grammar. By and by the often used pictures develop to real letters.

Since When Did This Scripture Exist?

An exact time can hardly be specified, but one undervalues the resourcefulness of the ancient human beings if one sets the start of the writing in a close dependancy to the time of the finding of first scriptures. Writing is, similar to talking, a basic human need, and as soon as people realized that a dove wants to return to its original nest they could imagine the chance to send informations per air mail, an essential advantedge at trading and war.

Why Are There No Findings Of This Scriptings?

Usually a all-day-scripting is written at light material that is ruinous after some centuries. So we cannot bargain for findings from the dawn of the scripting. How can it be that the missing if findings serves as a proof for tat there has been no scripting? The picture with the flying dove with the partial unroled scripture at its foot shows that the scripting was in use long ago before the Disc was created (Simultaneous depiction of two actions that happened one after another), for as a character can only serve what is generally known.

How Did Those Letters Look Like?

Some pictures of the Disc remind very much to certain minuscules, and in the context of the text they just carry their place. It is

• the sheep skin as ( = small livestock),
• the walking man as ( = I walk),
• the shield boss as ( )
• and the helmet ( ), which shape - redrawn from the nose to the neck - records the shape of the sigma at the end of a word, and which occurs in two variants: with bush at the end of the words, and without bush in the inner of the words, a hint that the bush of the helmet was taken off in the house.
• The flying dove represents the ( I go home), therefore also the nu as a symbol of a flying bird belongs to the archetypes of characters.

Why Is The Scripture Of The Disc So Different To The Usual Greec Scripture?

It is not an all-day-script but a sacral script, that was shaped to the bilingual arrangement of cultural events (here: a Greek-Minoan funeral event) and which demonstrates an enormous understanding for language and scripture. But also the material conditiones were considered. By using multiple stamps one had the possibility to use pictograms that would have been difficult to write but easy to read, and one was able to introduce double characters, which increased the writing speed and saved space (important at a little disc!).

They made differences between aspirated and non-aspirated vowels, (with and without „h”), and they created new pictures out of the sacral and profane area, which could express the dignity of the human beings just with their scripting. The beginning of the name of the bereaved was probably marked by a character made of ivory (or gold), for this position shows some unexplainable bumpiness (traces of dissolution). The two at the Disc appearing sacral characters reappear in the capital alphabet, at many of the other characters one can see the similarity to the minuscules.

But also at letters which are not contained in the Disc one can conclude the picture content. So could have been

• the small upsilon () a water situla ( )
• the capital alpha in its rectangular shape () a sanctum (next to the street) ( )
• the beta () arms crossed in devotion ( )
• the delta () a burning peace of wood ( )
• the theta () a big shild with clamp ( )
• the sigma () a lightning flash ( )
• the psi () a psaltery (string instrument) and
• the omega () the ground plan of an odeon, a little theater

In multiple statements to my interpretation of the Disc there were never listed solid arguments against the interpretation of the pictures, against the text or its translation, but it was all dimissed as „accidentally and arbitrarily”. But where is it „accidentally and arbitrarily” if all the figures can be put down to Greek basic words (about 3 Minoian phonemes at side B can only be conjectured), if all the writing habits, even the writing of the u-phoneme by omicron plus upsilon, can be found even nowadays in the Greek language, and if it results to a text, that indeed doesn't completely fit to the classic Greek language, which is well understandable and completely in harmony with the funeral ritual from the ancient world. Additionally all the questions that were asked at the beginning can be answered.

Wouldn't it be much more consequent to reason that the Greek scripting is much older as currently assumed?

The appearence of two alphabet system cam be explained as following:

1.	The older all-day-scripting (minuscules) works without differentation.
2.	The decorative stamp scripting creates a lot of new letters, to be able to decide between sacral and profane, aspirated and non-aspirated, open and closed O-phoneme, and it sets the basics of the current habits of writing.
3.	From the sacral letters that were able to be used for the writing and some minuscules a representative scripture arised with letters with steady-going height (majuscules), compareable to a full dress. The all-day-scripting written only at light material (minuscules plus some majuscules at the beginning of a word) is discovered much later by findings.