The book θηβη ανδρομεδια εστια
After self publishing the book Side's Disk at Phaistos (2013, ISBN: 978-960-93-5165-2), I made some modifications coming up with a new translation. A new book was then prepared but I decided to encompass it in my book Thebe Andromedia Estia which was self published this year [2014] (ISBN: 978-960-93-5739-5).
In this book I use isopsephia to study and decipher one of the greatest mysteries, the age-old Phaistos disc. In ancient Hellas each letter of the Ionic alphabet had a specific arithmetic value. Thus every word or phrase also had a specific numeric value that could be computed by adding up the value of each of it's letters. Going back in time, in parallel with reading the clay disc will reveal how the alphabet was created. In reference to the mythological and ethnological context of Minoan Crete, a significant number of books have been published that delve into this area, as also there are others that statistically analyze syllables in relevant writing systems - such as Linear A and Linear B. We will turn our attention to wordnumbers and an early alphabet which was in use in parallel with the disc's hieroglyphic writing system. In other words we will not use modern isopsephia, there would be no sense in doing such a thing, but rather study the relative age-old wordnumbers in secret use at the time the disk was created.
By studying the disc via isopsephia, and finding the manufacturer's phonetic plan we were able to match voice values with difficult symbols, symbols with a low appearance frequency. The result was stunning, as the text was intelligible, although the language was an early for of Hellenic. Taking us to the Thera eruption event, the deciphering reveals on the first side a request for sending a rescue squad, while on the other side we find the relative affirmative response. Among other things, it provided scientific information from different fields such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so on. In other words, the disc is a sort of "ark" of knowledge, a unique cosmic artifact. We hope this book inspires further study of the object by specialists of different scientific fields.
