Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Discovered on July 3, 1908, the Phaistos Disc is a strange circular tablet with a spiral of undecipherable symbols that have perplexed experts for more than a century.
• The strange disc also represents the earliest examples of blind printing, as the symbols themselves are not inscribed but rather pressed into the soft clay.
• While theories have suggested that it’s some type of curved text or perhaps the recording of an ancient poem or hymn, a new preprint posits that the artifact is an ancient board game whose rules have been long forgotten.

On July 3, 1908, Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier discovered a disc-shaped artifact that would go on to stump experts for more than a century. Discovered in the Palace of Phaistos on the Greek island of Crete—the second-largest palace credited to the ancient Minoan civilization after the Palace of Knossos—the aptly named Phaistos Disc, measuring roughly 6.3 inches in diameter and housed in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, isn’t your typical artifact.

Instead of an identifiable language, the object displays 241 symbols, 45 of which are distinct, that are all arranged in a spiral formation, suggesting that the artifact was meant to be read from the edge—much like playing a not-so-friendly game of Monopoly. The symbols are representations of different human forms, animals, objects, weapons, and armor. Other theories, referencing some symbols on the artifact that appear to repeat, suggest that the disc might be a representation of a poem or hymn.

“The phrases on side A begin with similar signs, and those on side B end in similar signs, suggesting repetitious phrases on A and rhyming phrases on B,” the authors John Younger and Paul Rehak wrote in 2008. “For these reasons, it is likely that the Phaistos Disc records a poem or song, or, if it is religious, as some suppose, a chant or hymn.”

The fact that the disc has 45 different symbols is perplexing, as the number of unique characters exceeds typical alphabetic character counts (around 20 or 30) but is far lower than that found in hieroglyphic texts, which can reach into the hundreds.

The artifact itself was found in a burned deposit in a storage area of the palace. One of the theories as to why it was so well-preserved is that the clay tablet was initially left unfired but was essentially cured like clay being put in a kiln during one of the many fires that plagued the palace over the centuries, including the infamous Minoan eruption of Santorini around 1,700 B.C.E. as well as another fire a few centuries later, possibly caused by the invading Mycenaeans around 1450 B.C.E.

Interestingly, the way the disc was manufactured also appears to be millennia ahead of its time. Instead of carved inscriptions, the Phaistos Disc contains symbols pressed into soft clay, a process known as blind printing that wouldn’t be seen again until the medieval period thousands of years later.

“If the disc is, as assumed, a textual representation, we are really dealing with a ‘printed’ text, which fulfills all definitional criteria of the typographic principle,” German linguist Herbert Brekle wrote for the German journal Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (Gutenberg Yearbook) in 1997.

But in a strange twist, some of the earliest theories about the Phaistos Disc being a board game have resurfaced. A new preprint details how the orientation and manufacturing process suggest that the disc’s mostly likely use was for entertainment. The fact that it was unfired clay suggests that the strange tablet is actually a prototype that was stored away for millennia for some unknown reason.

Whether a traditional text, a topsy-turvy poem, or a board game whose rules have been lost to time, the Phaistos Disc remains as mysterious as ever.