Thousands of years before the actual CDs, man has used discs for recording information. A clay disc made 4000 years ago, found by Italian archaeologists in Crete in 1907, contains recorded information with the same logic of current CD- ROMs.
The so-called "Phaistos Disc" is a circular clay plate, recorded during Bronze Age with spiral inscriptions, and contains according to scientists who analyzed it, a pray to a mother or female deity.
The 15cm diameter disc covered with inscriptions on both sides, was found in Phaistos palace over 100 years ago. Over time, dozens of scientists have speculated about the meaning of the inscriptions on it.
Gareth Owens, investigator at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, believes that the disk should be read in spiral from the outside to the inside as the current CDs, and it's written in a lost language.
Entries contain symbols, organized into 241 groups. Owens has identified 45 different unique symbols - among them, one seems to be a headband with feathers, other a child and another one a beehive.
The British 50 years old archaeologist went to Crete in theory for 6 months, 25 years ago. Scientists are now trying to unravel the disc content and its concrete function.
To decrypt the disk, the archaeologist used as a basis for translation a particular set of symbols that were repeated recurrently.
"The amount and most stable word in all languages of the world and of history is the word mother" says Owens, quoted by Archaeology News Network. Using the chosen keyword, the scientist partially identified some "phrases" as "a lady of great importance" and "pregnant mother".
In the video below, the lecture given by Gareth Owens at TEDx about the mysterious Phaistos Disc:
The durability of a CD- ROM is finite: a normal music CD, made of plastic with an alloy of platinum, lasts about 15 years. A industrial storage disc, made with gold, lasts "only" 300 years before you start losing legibility.
But the first recorded disc that is known was made in clay 4,000 years ago - and is still readable.
source: http://zap.aeiou.pt
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