Imagine inventing movable type thousands of years before Gutenberg, using it to stamp a single clay disc, and then the technology simply vanishes into the dirt for millennia. That is the unsettling reality of the Phaistos Disc, one of archaeology's most famous unsolved puzzles.

This episode digs into the literal ashes surrounding this Minoan Bronze Age artifact, found on Crete in 1908. We cover the bizarre circumstances of its discovery, the fierce hoax debate, the astonishing technology behind it, and why the brightest linguistic minds still cannot crack its code.

• How Luigi Pernier found the fired clay disc in a sealed underground cell packed with ash and burnt bovine bones, inches from an unrelated Linear A tablet
• The typographic breakthrough: 241 symbols stamped from 45 individual pre-made seals, which Jared Diamond ca ...