[SunkenCiv]

:') My apologies, the *artifact* is unique; Fell made educated guesses regarding character assignments, basing that on some Anatolian writing systems which use characters resembling those on the Phaistos disk. If the disk is authentic, the use of dies to make the inscription suggests a manufacturing / duplication process; that suggests the question, what happened to the others?

But anyway, here's something I scrawled in Ancient Times (it was over at The Globe forum), October 9, 2000 17:54:39 EDT:

A royal seal pressed into clay, with a Minoan hieroglyphic inscription (?), found at Knossos. If these four characters are Linear A as they appear to be, using my best guesses from Barry Fell's work on Linear A, they represent the consonants lu - ak/ag - ke - su/yu (the slashes indicate that I'm not sure which sign to use). ESOP Volume 4, No. 77 (p 26) shows the first two symbols and two others, translated as lugal that is, the king. The first character lu is a loan word meaning "man royal". Figure from p 37, The Aegean Civilizations by Peter Warren, 1989, a volume of the The Making of the Past series.

[colorado tanker]

Seems a little suspicious the authorities won't allow the test that could prove it one way or the other.