(Original post from 2008. -Ed.)

In September Jerry Eisenberg, editor of Minerva, visited and worked with the unpublished material on the Phaistos Disk in the Bennett archives. Here is Dr. Eisenberg’s report:

It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity of working with the archives of Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., housed at your Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, during my visit this past week. They were invaluable for my work on the Phaistos Disk – a good deal of the material that I unearthed will be presented in a paper that I will be giving at the International Conference on the Phaistos Disk that I will be chairing in London on October 31-November 1 at the Society of Antiquaries.

I was so pleased to find so many documents on the disk in Bennett’s files, including some surprising discoveries in the unpublished manuscripts that were sent to Dr. Bennett over the years. A good number were contributions from scholars that were not represented in my already extensive files.

Your own participation in the forthcoming Conference on the Phaistos Disk will obviously be a great asset and I am certain that your paper on some of the intriguing decipherments of the disk from the unpublished manuscripts in the Bennett archives will prove to be of considerable importance to the scholars who attend.

I was overwhelmed by the extent of the holdings that you have brought to the university, especially the archives of Dr. Bennett and those of Alice Kobler. Your incredible enthusiasm for your work and in the progress of your students in their studies speaks for itself. Needless to say, I now know the meaning of the much-touted Texas hospitality and hope to have the pleasure of doing further research at the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory in the near future.

Sincerely,

Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Minerva, The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology,
and
Chairman, The International Conference on the Phaistos Disk
New York, New York 10022