Version 0.2.0 — research preview
A small local-first side project for exploring the Phaistos Disc: interactive inspection, corpus tooling, and statistics that try hard not to fool themselves. This is not a decipherment claim and not an academic monograph.
Primary fun feature: generate and open the interactive workbench with phaistos workbench.
- Browse the Evans 45-sign catalogue and group transcriptions.
- Inspect physical observations (stamp overlaps, palimpsests, incised strokes) separately from interpretive readings.
- Run entropy / n-gram stats and Monte Carlo null checks.
- Generate a standalone HTML workbench for dual-face spiral inspection and optional audio playback.
It deliberately does not assume that the Disc is prose, that groups are words, that signs are syllabograms, or that Linear A/B unlocks the text.
See METHODOLOGY.md for the evidence hierarchy, unicity bounds, and surrogate controls (the Skeptic Rule).
On Side A, groups A16, A19, and A22 carry the identical four-sign sequence:
02-12-31-26
(Evans numbers; often written with an accompanying oblique stroke on those groups.) That identity is an L1 transcription fact in the Godart-style edition used here — not a genre or language claim.
Everything else below (meter, refrain, hymn, ritual reading) is interpretive scaffolding built around that observation.
| Tier | Meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| L0 Observation | Clay marks, overlaps, palimpsests, stylus strokes | Stamp collisions; A05 / A08 / B01 palimpsests |
| L1 Transcription | Evans 01–45, group boundaries | A16 = 02-12-31-26 |
| L2 Palaeographic parallel | Visual resemblance only | Shape analogies to other Aegean scripts |
| L3 Hypothesis | Phonetics, meter, genre, theology | Mora counts, “paean”, deity names |
An L3 story never upgrades into an L0/L1 fact. Details: METHODOLOGY.md.
These are research hypotheses under active testing. Treat them as prompts for falsification, not results.
- Mora / meter models — Assigning mora weights to signs and looking for responsion on Side A (and stanza-like sums on Side B) can look structured under some coding choices. That does not prove a hymn meter; surrogate and look-elsewhere checks apply.
- Genre (strophic hymn / paean-like) — A poetic or performative reading of the repeating
02-12-31-26groups is one plausible story. It is not demonstrated. - Religious / liturgical readings — Invocations, deity names (including anything resembling Paiawon / “God”), offering contexts from Room 8 or Tablet PH 1, etc., are interpretive overlays. Do not cite this repo as establishing them.
- Fabrication mechanics — Cord-and-pin spiral drafting and outside-in stamping are models fitted to geometry and overlap data; strong fit ≠ exclusive proof of workshop practice.
- Clay provenance — Local Mesara-style fabric is a comparative petrographic hypothesis. Do not treat percentage matches or “local Crete proven” slogans as settled geology.
- Comparative Linear A / suffix grids — Likelihood ratios and SVD factorizations are exploratory; they do not confirm sound values.
Falsifications of popular claims (Saros calculator, Mehen board, modern forgery, etc.) are likewise provisional lab results: useful as stress tests, not courtroom verdicts. Prefer reporting surrogate ranks and effect sizes over “p = 0.0000 proves X.”
uv run phaistos workbench --output reports/workbench.html
# Public / GitHub Pages build (Commons CC BY-SA disc facsimiles; no local museum WebPs):
uv run phaistos workbench --output site/workbench/index.html --pages-safe --no-open-browserOpens a standalone HTML explorer (dual-face SVG spiral, group inspection, optional Karplus–Strong-style audio hooks). Full local builds may embed optional undocumented museum photos as data URIs; --pages-safe builds use relative Wikimedia Commons disc facsimiles and Hagia Triada realia crops (CC0 / CC BY-SA 4.0 — see docs/media/ATTRIBUTION.md).
After the repo is on GitHub, enable Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions. The pages.yml workflow deploys a rights-safe demo to https://{owner}.github.io/phaistos-disk/.
Third-party museum photographs under reports/visuals/photos/ remain excluded from the public default tree; see NOTICE. Do not assume MIT covers third-party media.
Requires Python 3.12 or 3.13 and uv.
git clone https://github.com/lessthanzero/phaistos-disk.git
cd phaistos-disk
uv sync
uv run pytestUseful first commands:
uv run phaistos validate
uv run phaistos signs
uv run phaistos stats
uv run phaistos epigraphy
uv run phaistos prosody # metrical *hypotheses* — read output skeptically
uv run phaistos workbench # interactive UIHeavier batteries (many surrogates) belong on a batch machine; see dual-machine notes below.
| Command | Role |
|---|---|
phaistos validate |
Corpus / invariant checks |
phaistos signs |
Evans catalogue |
phaistos stats |
Entropy / n-grams |
phaistos epigraphy |
Overlaps, palimpsests, strokes |
phaistos prosody |
Mora / responsion hypotheses |
phaistos strokes |
Oblique-stroke audits |
phaistos tablet-ph1 |
Nearby Linear A tablet PH 1 |
phaistos workbench |
Generate interactive HTML |
phaistos deep-six --surrogates N |
Multi-frontier surrogate battery |
Full command list: uv run phaistos --help.
Interactive work on macOS; long Monte Carlo sweeps on a Fedora worker (pc) if you have one:
./scripts/sync_artifacts.sh pc push
./scripts/remote_worker.sh pc "uv run pytest"
./scripts/remote_worker.sh pc "uv run phaistos deep-six --surrogates 5000"
./scripts/sync_artifacts.sh pc pullKeep single-process memory modest (worker class ~16 GB).
phaistos-disk/
├── corpus/ # Transcriptions, physical observations, comparative YAML
├── src/phaistos/ # Library + Typer CLI
├── tests/ # pytest suite
├── scripts/ # remote_worker.sh, sync_artifacts.sh
├── experiments/ # Run logs; generated audio (local)
├── reports/ # Generated workbench / SVGs (local; photos often excluded)
├── METHODOLOGY.md # Skeptic Rule, unicity, surrogates
├── NOTICE # MIT code vs media carve-outs
└── pyproject.toml # package metadata (0.2.0)
Raw corpus under corpus/ is treated as immutable evidence encoding — do not “fix” L0/L1 to fit a reading.
- Code (and original generated SVG / synthesized WAV produced by this project): MIT.
- Media carve-outs: third-party photos and some Wikimedia-derived material are not MIT-relicensed and may be absent from the public tree. See NOTICE.
Keep NOTICE with redistributions.
Release hygiene and tooling were assisted by Cursor Agent (Composer), Codex (GPT-5.6) (peer-review / critique), Antigravity 3.8 Flash, and local Ollama models (qwen2.5, gemma2, qwen2.5-coder) for adversarial review. Scientific claims remain the author’s; see docs/OUTREACH_DRAFTS.md.
Working transcriptions cite standard editions (e.g. Godart 1995; earlier Evans / Pernier / Olivier / Duhoux). Comparative notes point at GORILA, SigLA, and related scholarship. Those are encoding sources — not endorsements of any decipherment.
For how claims are stress-tested here, start with METHODOLOGY.md.