Re: Vinca

Michael Everson wrote:

> >Hartmann's book is crammed with errors. (Unfortunately Dietz Otto Edzard
> >mentioned this to me about two days after my special-ordered copy
> >arrived and was paid for, and I never had the heart to read it. The
> >illustrations are mostly copied from Jensen.)
>
> I don't know if a "Hartmann" wrote a book called Die
> Universalgeschichte der Schrift. I know that Harald Haarmann did, and
> his discussion of Vinca is pp. 70-81.

Yeah, that one too. (It wouldn't be polite to point out the previous
poster's getting the name wrong?)

NB he has at least one book in English on pre-writing, so you don't have
to try to penetrate his turgid German. But it isn't any better.

> So, Peter: the Phaistos disk. Document or board game?

As Emmett Bennett says, *every* decipherment of Phaistos is correct
(since there's absolutely nothing to control the results against). (He
refused to contribute to WWS if there was going to be a picture of the
Phaistos disk. I hadn't been planning to include one.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...