Heraklion Archaeological Museum

This guide to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum centers on a small clay disc that Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier pulled from a burnt storeroom at Phaistos on July 3, 1908, its two faces stamped with more than forty spiraling picture-signs repeated some two hundred forty times. You'll hear how those signs were pressed with individual stamps rather than scratched by hand, long before movable type existed in Europe, and why over a century of scholars still can't agree what language, or purpose, it records. The guide also stops at two small painted women gripping snakes, pulled from Knossos and rebuilt into the goddesses now pictured whenever people imagine Minoan Crete.