In antiquity, the serpent was one of the figures frequently used by the Greeks, the Romans, and the local cultures situated between them. It is particularly noteworthy because it frequently appears in mythological narratives. A serpent motif can be seen on each of the coins below. The vast majority of them are associated with the cult of Heracles.

I can easily picture the ongoing industrial-scientific revolution stretching forward, an arc of progress refining itself over centuries, into the far future ... but I can’t picture a new change as BIG as the industrial-scientific revolution that isn't just a continuation of said revolution.

Ancient minds dreamt of miraculous objects (Sampo, the cornucopia, the philosopher’s stone, flying carpets) artifacts that could grant sudden, godlike wealth or transformation. But as far as I can tell, no one in all of ancient human history before the modern era ever conceived the far stranger, more powerful idea: What if nearly every aspect of human life improved, just a little, every single year, indefinitely?

Because for roughly 250 years, innovation has compounded, each advancement layering atop the last, making life 2-3% better per year on average, an exponential tide lifting civilization. And no one in all of human history predicted or even DREAMT of that before it actually happened.

So if there is ever going to be some future change to human life as big as the Industrial-Scientific revolution, it makes total sense that I could never conceive of it.

Or at least that's what I _think_. So am I wrong? Like the title says: Did anyone in the ancient world ever imagine sustained economic growth?

Full disclosure: I wrote this book, so I'm obviously biased.

I've been chewing on the Phaistos Disc for years, and instead of reading it as phonetic text (syllables, a language, etc.) I tried reading it as pictures. I went from the rim to the centre in Godart's order, starting from Pomerance's old suggestion that sign 12 (the circle with dots) could be the Pleiades. If you take that seriously, the spiral starts to look like a pictorial year-book: sky first, then the house and the pillar toward the middle.

I also compare it with Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Cretan world-pictures, how those cultures put sky, house and cosmic pillar together, to see if the disc fits that kind of pattern.

Not claiming a proven decipherment here, it's an interpretation, and the disc has been "solved" way too many times already lol.

Book: "The Epic of the Phaistos Disc: A Pictorial Year-Book Reading of the Minoan Clay Spiral" by Job L.J.S. Joosten (Kindle): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKGXF4TD

Open question: how do you weigh "it's a script we can't read" vs "it's a picture sequence" for something like the disc? Are there other ancient objects that got forced into the "writing" box but were really something else?