A Mystery in Clay: Codes, Languages, and a Journey Through Time to the Last Ice Age

At the outset, A Mystery in Clay evolved out of a sense of curiosity surrounding an enigmatic disk unearthed on Crete, the famous, or perhaps infamous Phaistos Disk. The strangeness of the object itself has inspired many attempts to decode it. The fact that none of these attempts have been provably successful has inspired a groundswell of alternative approaches, rather than a sense of resignation or fatalism. In this respect, attempts to decode the disk are not unlike the reason we 'climb Mount Everest'. The disk is every bit as much as uncharted territory. However, any realistic attempt to decode the disk not only employs Cryptology, but leads down the unknown path of modern Linguistics as well. At the outset, the reader possesses none of the tools of either Cryptology, or modern Linguistics, and so deciphering the Phaistos Disk can be thought of as an entertaining exercise that is not unlike an 'extreme' vacation where the adventurer is given a knife, a flint, and left to his own devices out on the plains of Africa, or in the Everglades. The question then becomes, can we develop the tools and techniques necessary to survive? Here, survival means developing the ability to render at least a rough approximation of what the disk might say, given the crude original tools at our disposal, in this case the internet and our brains.