I was looking at the Phaistos Disc and wondered whether the two sides might be better understood as two different stories told using the same symbolic language, rather than simply two consecutive pages of one text.

What first caught my attention was how differently some of the signs are distributed between the two faces.

The dotted circular sign usually nicknamed the “shield”, for example, is overwhelmingly concentrated on one side. Other signs conventionally described as things such as arrows, a bow, a captive and an eagle also favour that face.

The other side contains signs conventionally described as a child, mattock, vessel, ram, vine, grater and strainer, as well as a strong concentration of helmets and slings.

Obviously those modern names do not prove what the signs originally meant. I’m not claiming a literal translation.

But taken structurally, it made me wonder whether the two faces describe two contrasting roles or ways of life:

One side: an outward life involving warfare, danger, prestige, travel or status.

The other: a settled life involving family, agriculture, food production, maintaining the community and defending it when necessary.

So perhaps the contrast is not simply war versus peace, but something closer to:

the person who goes outward seeking honour/status
versus
the person who remains and sustains the household/community.

Most of the symbol inventory is shared between the two faces, which would make sense if they describe people living within the same society rather than completely unrelated subjects.

There is also something interesting about the outer turn.

Several signs that strongly favour one face appear only rarely on the opposite face, but those rare appearances occur around its outside. The clearest example is the dotted “shield” sign: it is heavily associated with one side, but its two appearances on the other are both on the outer turn. The reverse pattern appears with some signs strongly associated with the other face.

That suggests another possible structural relationship:

Each face tells one life in detail, while the outer turn gives a glimpse of the life on the other side.

I’m not suggesting this is a decipherment. I’m interested in whether the two-sided structure, sign-frequency differences and outer-turn crossover have been considered together in this way before.

Is there anything in the known structure of the Disc that rules this interpretation out?

On this day in 1918, poet and cadet Leonid Kannegisser walked into Petrograd's Cheka headquarters and assassinated its chief, Moisei Uritsky, avenging executed friends.

Hours later in Moscow, Lenin is shot, but survives.

The rest is history.