The solution to the Phaistos Disk maze puzzle offers a Mediterranean Bronze Age math proof of infinity in the form of a numerical palindrome - 1235445321 - certainly worth preserving in fire-hardened terra cotta for posterity.
To solve the maze, and experience the palindrome, overlap Side 1 onto Side 2 (orange spiral on top of blue spiral) at the matching, connecting line segments. Next, start at the center of Side 1, then move counterclockwise. Cross over from Spiral 3, Side 1, to Spiral 5, Side 2 (green bug), and move clockwise. Cross over from Spiral 5, Side 2, to Spiral 4, Side 1 (pink bug) and move counterclockwise. Cross over from Spiral 4, Side 1, to Spiral 4, Side 2 (purple bug), move clockwise. Cross over from Spiral 4, Side 2, to Spiral 5, Side 1 (yellow bug), move counterclockwise. Cross over from Spiral 5, Side 1, to Spiral 3, Side 2 (orange bug), move clockwise and travel to the center of Side 2 , creating the shape of a figure 8 twice. Return in the same pattern. (1, 2, 3 into 5, 5 into 4, 4 into 4, 4 into 5, 5 into 3, 2, 1)
The maze puzzle has been solved and the numerical palindrome math proof of infinity established.
The Phaistos Disk puts the art in artifact as it delivers complex information in a simple way, based on the Minoan love of mazes and their creation of
our 48 original constellations by connecting stars with lines, and it makes use of an invisible dimension to continue its revelations about the Minoan world. The invisible dimension is its main revelation.
The two-sided
terra cotta disk from the Mediterranean Bronze Age was found in 1908 in a
basement of the burned-down Phaistos Palace, Crete. Fire-hardened,
perhaps by the fire, it is an anomaly in a Minoan world of sun-baked
pottery. One of archaeology's greatest mysteries, it is, like the universe, a
masterpiece of concealment. When we are right in the heart of it, we see
chaos, but that only conceals the patterns. From out of this ancient world, from the same time and the same place, comes the other renown mystery, the Maze of Daedalus. Are the Phaistos Disk and the Maze of Daedalus the same thing? In the Phaistos Disk, we have the artifact but not the narrative, and in the Maze of Daedalus, we have the narrative but not the artifact. They fit together like interlocking puzzle pieces.
The Daedalus myth, from Greek mythology that began in the Minoan
civilization, involves the Shell Riddle. King Minos of Crete went searching
for Daedalus, the renown inventor and favorite of Queen Pasiphae, at the urging of his wife. The inventor was wandering the world in grief, and the king and queen were much concerned. A tragedy had occurred.
Daedalus had invented remarkable wings fashioned of feathers and wax and designed to give flight to whomever wore them. While he was busy working on a project for the queen, his son Icarus put on the wings and flew too close to the sun. When the wax melted he crashed and died.
Daedalus, in his grief, blamed himself and wandered the Aegean world mourning the loss of his son. After burying Icarus, Daedalus traveled to Camicus in Sicily, where he stayed as a guest under the protection of King Cocalus. (Wikipedia)
As King Minos searched for Daedalus he carried with him a seashell puzzle, called the Shell Riddle, and asked everyone he met to solve it. He knew that only Daedalus could solve the riddle, and this was how he meant to identify him since he might be much changed in appearance.
The Phaistos Disk is the spiral seashell, and the spirals of the
Disk are the string running through. The string becomes more famously known as Ariadne's Thread
in a late Bronze Age fiction written by Plutarch based on the Shell Riddle, and involving Theseus, a Minotaur, and a maze. The
riddle in all cases is how to get all the way through the seashell to find the honey, or through
the maze to escape the Minotaur, or through the Disk to solve the maze.
The solution to a maze puzzle is the uninterrupted path through a series of intricate line segments from a starting point to a goal. This maze puzzle, the Shell Riddle, is not solved until the outside spirals of the seashell are part of the uninterrupted path from the center of Side 1 (flower/sun) to the center of Side 2 (honey pot/star.) Only if the ants can easily travel in a straightforward manner on the outside spirals (edges of the Disk) to find the Honey Pot is the Shell Riddle solved.
The disk was found in 1908 at Phaistos, Crete, beneath the palace in a basement corner accessible by a trap door above, where the palace had been burned to the ground by an intense fire. This could explain how the disk came to be fire-hardened in a civilization of sun-baked pottery. Beside the disk was a tablet of Linear A writing (undeciphered) of ancient Crete, perhaps explaining it.
This disk comes from Minoan Crete, the ancient civilization famous for the Maze of Daedalus and for naming our constellations. The disk is about 6" in diameter and 1" thick. Mathematics is apparent on the disk, and even if we cannot understand what the disk is all about right away, we can discover Mediterranean Bronze Age concepts of mathematical symmetry on this disk just by counting the pictographs, the spirals, and the line segments.
The artifact is terracotta pottery and only a little larger than a CD, with 2 inscribed sides and 2 spirals per side, each spiral with 5 rings (10). The spirals are divided into 60 line segments (30 Side 1, 30 Side 2). The outside spirals have 12 line segments (24 outside); inside spirals have 18 (36 inside). Divided among the line segments and etched into the disk are 48 unique miniature pictographs, most of them replicated to create 240 pictographs. 37 are created to appear identical and are repeated various times. 11 are unrepeated.
The Phaistos Disk seems to be covered with hidden patterns of a GEOMETRY THEOLOGY AND NUMBER PHILOSOPHY that preserves the science that built the Great Pyramid and that became the foundation of Western Science and Religion. This is based on the mostly forgotten and nearly lost antique science of Containment of Geometrical Arrangements.
The solution to this world-famous enigma involves connecting with lines the matching pictographs to produce hidden, larger pictographs. Because the pictographs are so tiny they appear to be identical and can be isolated to be connected with lines, as in points connected with lines to produce geometry or stars connected with lines to produce constellations. This is a Mediterranean Bronze Age science.
The disk delivers complex information in a simple way. Based on the Minoan love of mazes and the ancient method of forming constellations by connecting stars with lines, the disk conceals the constellation Argo and other related images that are revealed when matching pictographs are connected by lines.
Euclidean Geometry is on the Phaistos Disk 1,300 years before Euclid. Where did Euclid get his plane geometry for which he is so famous if not from this Mediterranean Bronze Age science? It does become evident via the Phaistos Disk that the Minoans had intimate knowledge of the Great Pyramid - the outside, the inside, from above, from below, from the side. Evidencing their knowledge of the Egyptian concept of Duat, they also knew of its existence high above in the stars as the sails of the constellation Argo.
These identifiable large pictographs (above) are revealed by connecting all of their matching pictographs. Matching pictographs connected with lines produce larger pictographs. See below the pictographs on the disk that are variously repeated and intended to appear to be identical.
48 unique pictographs are distributed in the spirals in a seeming random way over both sides of the disk for 240 impressions. When all the matching pictographs are connected to themselves, every piece of Euclidean geometry emerges, 1,300 years before Euclid lived. Revealed are diameter, right triangle, cone, every kind of triangle, polygons, parallel lines of same length and different length, and significant, large images of the Great Pyramid, inside and out, from below, from above and from the side, an image of the constellation Argo, an image of a spiral maze with a triangle at the center, an image of a big star inside a heptagram - maybe it is the star Sirius inside the seven planets, maybe it's the path of Venus, maybe it's the ancient symbol for astronomy, or maybe it's all of these! Did the Minoans have a geometry philosophy called Planeism
Bronze Age geometry theology may have passed from Minoan Crete into mysticism to eventually became known as Sacred Geometry.
It is easy to see how a visionary artist familiar with this ancient science could envision the creation of a disk with other familiar forms - the boat, the star, the pyramid - and not just the natural geometrical arrangements (geometry) that would occur by connecting with lines the matching distributed pictographs on the disk. None of the pictographs are randomly placed on the Phaistos Disk. If the glyphs were hieroglyphs, as so many linguists are hoping for, then the ability to communicate additional pictographs would be lost because the glyphs would need to form sentences and could not therefore be precisely placed to form images.
Information about this ancient world would be completely lost in time because, in order to recall it, we would need to be able to speak or decipher the script. If we could not, then all would be lost. But a simple method of connecting familiar pictographs with lines would leave us able to comprehend their world because we would be able to see and understand the pictures without having to know the dead language, the idea being that geometry is universal, the stars are eternal, and the Great Pyramid is permanent. This Phaistos Disk method of transmitting information is brilliant, to say the least.
A pictograph is an ideogram, conveying its meaning through what it resembles, unlike hieroglyphs that tell a story using alphabetic composition. Where hieroglyphs gain meaning by successive placement of the glyphs and represent words, pictographs gain meaning by selective grouping of the signs and convey ideas by what they resemble. Where script is a language that can be deciphered and read involving speech sounds, a pictograph is a symbol complete within itself representing an object or an idea.
These disk pictographs, for example, are what they seem to resemble; a pig, ?, an axe, ?, a fish, and a crab. What other meanings can they have? Grouped together this way they seem to be ideograms representing parts of a wide-spread ancient Egyptian mythology well-known to the Minoans and the Aegean world - the Isis-Osiris mythology. In this set, when Osiris's evil brother Typhon was out hunting pigs, he found the body of Osiris, that he had originally tossed into the Nile inside a coffin-chest, and chopped it into pieces with his axe, then threw it into the Nile River where one of the pieces, the phallus, was eaten by the sharp-snout fish and the Nile crab.
In the case of the Phaistos Disk the locations of the pictographs are specific placeholders to anchor images and/or geometries that create even larger pictographs conveying even larger ideas. In this respect, the Phaistos Disk displays an advanced, well-thought-out system of picture writing.
Picture writing potentially can convey much more information about a civilization than a script can because it shows both the archetypal or universally understood elements of any civilization and also the elements of a specific civilization. Picture writing speaks to everyone, and this makes it a better method of communication than script for many reasons. Script is abstract and has to be learned, making script writing a part of the social, financial and political fabric of a civilization. Not everyone can understand script, and even today illiteracy rates are high even though we have to go to school to learn to read and write. But everyone can interpret picture writing. When one of the pictographs is deciphered or identified, then something about the civilization is deciphered or identified, and from this can come much information about the people, about how they lived their lives, what they believed in and how they expressed it. Arrange the pictographs differently and they mean something different. Place them in certain geometrical arrangements and, again, the meaning changes. Although the Phaistos Disk does not display a hieroglyphic narrative, this Bronze Age, pottery art masterpiece might record an ancient mythology, story or event by use of the narrative technique "continuous representation," the depiction of successive incidents or scenes within a single composition by artists telling a story with their art. It began in Mesopotamia and was fully developed in Minoan Crete in their mosaics.
The disk seems to be a fantastic example of continuous representation in art but instead of several successive scenes as in the Maze of Daedalus
there are successive pictographs or ideograms. In some instances, groups of pictographs and even line segments are exactly repeated or continuously represented, indicating a careful selection on the part of the artist(s) in using certain pictographs to anchor certain images and geometries in order to create continuous representation. This would afford additional meaning for this brilliant picture writing language. These line sequences are repeated - continously represented - on the Phaistos Disk.
Narrative art is art that tells a story, either as a moment in an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Some of the earliest evidence of human art suggests that people told stories with pictures. However, without some knowledge of the story being told it is very hard to read ancient pictures because they are not organized in a systematic way like words on a page, but rather can unfold in many different directions at once. (Wikipedia - "Narrative Art")
More on picture writing see: FANTASY INTERVIEW WITH SIR ARTHUR EVANS
It has been discovered that connecting similar signs arranged in concentric circles on an enigmatic artefact known as the "Disk of Phaistos" enables a hidden geometry to emerge...It seems to show signs amounting to a language but if it is a language no one has found a way to decipher it...
I had wondered before why the spiral was sort of uneven, when obviously there are a lot of "perfect" spirals in the Minoan art, but of course if the spiral was "perfect" then the patterns for the constellations and geometric shapes would not be accurate. So it makes the artistry involved in creating the Disk even more impressive! (Rhona Bloxsom, Reading, England)
Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2025, Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T., U.S. Copyright and under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, All rights reserved. No part of this web page may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Minos, meanwhile, searched for Daedalus by traveling from city to city asking a riddle. He presented a spiral seashell and asked for a string to be run through it. When he reached Camicus, King Cocalus, knowing Daedalus would be able to solve the riddle, accepted the shell and gave it to Daedalus. Daedalus tied the string to an ant which, lured by a drop of honey at one end, walked through the seashell stringing it all the way through." (Wikipedia, Daedalus)
Phaistos Disk, Side 1 and 2
Taking a clue from this unique, unrepeated pictograph (left, man holding a shield with seven tiny circles in the shape of a hexagram), the connect-the-dots approach of viewing the disk reveals in total eight significant and complex images or larger pictographs as well as numerous simple geometries concealed on the disk. The geometry is highlighted here, accomplished by removing the disk background and unused pictographs so only the matching ones remain, and the spiral is faded into background.Mediterranean Bronze Age Antique Science
CONTAINMENT OF GEOMETRICAL ARRANGEMENTS
Images above from left to right: Constellation Argo, Star Sirius and Seven Planets, Great Pyramid Exterior, Great Pyramid Interior, Great Pyramid Diameter, Great Pyramid - Apex, Base, and Two Sides, Right Triangle, Great Pyramid Warrior Perimeter
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. (Galileo)
UNIQUE PHAISTOS DISK PICTOGRAPHS
Traced and colorized
...in those days [of ancient Egypt] of initiate kings and rulers and sages who occupied themselves with the Sacred Science,
when the clear Aether spake face to face with them without disguise, or holding back aught, in answer to their deep scrutiny of holy things. (Thrice-Greatest Hermes, G.R.S. Mead)
PICTURE WRITING
CONTINUOUS REPRESENTATION
NARRATIVE ART
BEFORE WE PROCEED, A CAUTION FROM WILL DURANT
If now we try to restore this buried culture from the relics that remain -- playing Cuvier to the scattered bones of Crete -- let us remember that we are engaging upon a hazardous kind of historical television, in which imagination must supply the living continuity in the gaps of static and fragmentary material artificially moving but long since dead. Crete will remain inwardly unknown until its secretive tablets find their Champollion. (Will Durant, Life of Greece
)COMMENTS
"For further research and investigation into the Disk and its cosmic significance, I highly recommend Watson's work. I believe that her insights into this enigmatic artifact will, in time, prove to be the most accurate. (Peter Sterling, Harp Magic)
However, Claire Grace Watson has argued very cogently that these signs are ideograms not hieroglyphs -- so perhaps this disk is in itself a maze. Her practice of connecting similar signs on the disk with each other, as in a drawing puzzle where you join the dots, has generated startling results. Geometrical shapes are readily generated. The disk employs a geometry of alignment that goes beyond number and a set-square. Hers is an ingenious solution to a long-standing enigma, and it reinforces the notion that the ingenuity of the Cretans was valued in Egypt and throughout that fertile zone of the ancient world. (The Step is the Foot: Dance and Its Relationship to Poetry, Anthony Howell)
"I just wanted to tell you that I am very impressed by the astronomical and mathematical patterns you found on the Disk. I feel that the patterns you found are too many and too accurate to be mere coincidence, and joining the matching symbols is such a simple and elegant solution! I am very surprised that no-one else has noticed these patterns before!"
"I am very impressed with your achievement and I strongly believe that you deserve complete recognition both in Greece and abroad for your profound revelation. (Nick Kallianiotis)
