The Phaistos Disc And The Kartvelian Hypothesis

The Phaistos Disc (Crete, c. 17th century BCE) remains one of the most debated undeciphered artefacts of the ancient world. This paper separates three distinct claims implied by the Kartvelian hypothesis — (A) the Disc's language is genealogically related to the Zan branch of the Kartvelian family; (B) the Pelasgians of Greek historiography spoke a Zan-related language; (C) a Kartvelian substrate is detectable in the pre-Greek lexicon — and evaluates each against its own evidential standards. The full set of sign-value assignments proposed by Kvashilava is presented with critical assessment. A framework for applying the Kartvelian animacy diagnostic to Disc sign sequences is proposed and the conditions under which it could falsify or support the hypothesis are specified; the diagnostic has not yet been systematically applied across the full corpus. Claim B (the Pelasgian identification) is retained as a speculative historical note but withdrawn from the main evidential chain owing to unresolved phonological problems. The lexical substrate evidence (Claim C) is assessed as preliminary and requiring systematic expansion. None of the three claims is established; all remain hypotheses. The paper's contribution is to specify the research programme — the data, methods, and tests — required to evaluate the Kartvelian hypothesis rigorously.