In 1993 I came home to Atlanta, Georgia from the North American Bridge Championships, a competition I always enjoyed and still sometimes do. In bridge, the main thing you do in order to have a chance at winning is you visualize the cards you can't see in your opponents' hands and then deduce probable suit patterns based on the cards you can see in your own hand. You put what you can see with what you can't see together then bid and play the hand accordingly. When you're right about suit patterns you score better than when you're wrong. My mind had been developed that way through 22 years of playing tournament bridge, so it was working like that when I first saw a picture of the Phaistos Disk. I recognized it as a puzzle and just automatically looked for hidden patterns. Right away I saw something and of course became fascinated by it. I was captured in its spirals and I stopped playing bridge regularly for the next 20 years. Bridge just couldn't compete with the Phaistos Disk in terms of being a great puzzle.
Puzzles and mysteries, especially ancient mysteries and mysticism, always intrigued me. Coming home from the tournament, I went to the library, where I liked to hang out and study mysteries, to research the Great Pyramid of Giza, to find something more about its purpose as an archaeoastronomy site. I always enjoyed reading books about it. There had always been conjecture that the ancient Egyptians used the Great Pyramid for religious rituals, and being so interested in the mysterious Egyptian mystery schools and their religion, I pulled several books from the shelves to flip through them.
Ancient Unsolved Mysteries may have been the name of the book. It contained many pictures of mysterious objects, among them a large image of the tiny Phaistos Disk, a two-sided pottery artifact created about 1600 BCE during the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea. Here was the "most famous undeciphered artifact in archaeology," it said. Written above it were the words, "Who can read the Phaistos Disk?"
One of the pictographs on the disk stood out for me. It resembles a carpenter's square (left) and seemed familiar. I had seen it on another image entitled the Maze of Daedalus in that same book. I considered that to be a pattern. That's when it occurred to me, what if I could find patterns on the Phaistos Disk? Just at that moment, a dream I had the night before flashed in my mind and I remembered an old man with a beard saying to me, "There is a secret bridge. You will become the bridge."
I convinced myself that twenty-two years of solving bridge hands, combined with a graduate degree in English language with a concentration in myth and saga, gave me a better chance than most of solving this new puzzle, world-famous though it was as being unsolvable. Nothing new was known about it after 100 years of efforts and, even more challenging, the civilization that produced it is considered "lost." This only inspired my competitive nature. Who doesn't want to do what's never been done? I was on it like a duck on a june bug!
Before I researched the disk I evaluated my chances of success by studying the approach of the people making decipherment attempts. You do this in bridge. When you're serious, before you play you study those who went before you, the ones who left a trail via bridge books - what they did, what they knew, what they thought, what they figured out. All of those people who came before me and tried to decipher the Disk, and couldn't, all believed the same thing, that the pictographs on the Disk are the Minoan version of Egyptian hieroglyphs and, because they are situated inside the spirals, they are to be read in a spiral. For them, the only question is, which way do you read them, from the center spiraling out or from the outside spiraling in? Like a field of bridge players all taking the same wrong approach to the play of a hand, the decipherers collectively never veer from their wrong approach. They think it's the percentage approach so they stick with it.
But it's possible, and happens often in bridge, that in a field of players where everyone gets it wrong, one person will take an anti-percentage approach and get it right. More people would do that, I believe, if they didn't run up against such strong peer pressure to always take the percentage approach and let go the rare times when the anti-percentage approached actually works. That never stopped me in bridge from going the opposite direction of the crowd. And as a child I was always coloring outside the lines. I have been that one person so often in life that I thought I could be that one person with the Phaistos Disk as well.
But I think it was the I00 years of endless debates about whether to read the pictographs from the center spiraling out or from the outside spiraling in that made me feel I had a real chance. Endless debates in bridge are called post-mortems and are sometimes more about pontificating than analysis. Even more so with the Phaistos Disk. Almost everyone uses the Disk as a podium to stand upon and have their opinions and themselves be taken seriously. They never see it as a puzzle that can be solved. Like in bridge, they see it as an opportunity to advance themselves as a person of importance. With such a clear field, I did not hesitate. I planned to have it solved before the next bridge nationals, held three times a year. The next one was three months away. Because of the Phaistos Disk I missed that one and most of the ones that have followed. As of this moment (2025) I have been working on the Phaistos Disk for 32 years. That's a lot of missed Nationals and I don't regret it, either.
The first mistake they make, those would-be decipherers, is they all assume the spirals on the disk have no other purpose than to organize the pictographs. Like bridge players who think the suit colors are red and black just to keep the suits separated, neither see the colors or the spirals as information by themselves. And even though the disk is a two-sided artifact, nothing is ever said about the relationship of one side to the other, whereas I thought of each side of the disk as similar to a hand in bridge. One side is your hand and the other is your partner's hand, and the idea is to bridge the two hands to see how they fit together so you can get the big picture and make best use of the cards. When you take the anti-percentage approach with the Phaistos Disk, you get this puzzle solution and something remarkable - a Bronze Age math proof of infinity in the form of a numerical palindrome. This conflicts strongly with our arrogant notion of these ancient people as being quasi-Neolithic, yet here it is.
As for what the pictographs "say," all is not lost, but what they say is secondary to what they "show." Inside the spirals are 48 unique tiny, or teeny-tiny as we say in the South, pictographs, most of them replicated to create 240 pictographs. 37 are created to appear identical and are repeated various times. 11 are unrepeated. To see the hidden patterns, connect "matching" pictographs with lines. Those are the pictographs created to appear identical. They are placeholders for even larger pictographs conveying more information. (Listed from center Side 1 spiraling out to outside Side 2 spiraling in, with number of total times each unique pictograph appears.)
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So, in my desire to learn more about the Great Pyramid I discovered a kindred spirit from 3,600 years ago who also was very interested in it, a pottery artist who has been on top of it, inside it, down below it, all around it, and who profoundly understood the geometry that built it. From the vantage point of standing atop the world's tallest structure at that time, the artist saw the Constellation Argo and the star Sirius.
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Images above from left to right: Constellation Argo, Star Sirius and Seven Planets, Great Pyramid Exterior, Great Pyramid Interior with entrance to Subterranean Chamber, Great Pyramid - Apex, Base, and Two Sides, Great Pyramid Warrior Perimeter, Right Triangle, Diameter
It wasn't just any pottery artist, though, but a very famous one who traveled there frequently with a small army of warriors. I think the artist's name was Daedalus. By discovering something about Daedalus' great puzzle I became a bridge from the Mediterranean Bronze Age to my time in the world (whorl) and across that bridge I traveled into a lost civilization and I liked it so much I decided to live there in my head much of the time. It is an ancient world of the supremacy of art, and because of that it makes for a wonderful oasis.
The first few years I was researching the Phaistos Disk my mother would tell me I was wasting my time while my father was quietly interested in my research. Maybe my mother was right, financially speaking. I did turn down a well-paid position as head of data management in Human Resources at Hewlett Packard in Atlanta so I could move to St. Augustine, Florida and get a job waiting tables so my mind would be completely free of junk and I could focus on the Disk. I didn't tell them that, though. I made up some story about how the company was trying to force my hand regarding the employment contract.
Now, I live in HUD housing as a result of that decision but the place suits me. It's secure and I can afford it, and I don't have to listen to people on the elevator talk about their portfolios. In fact, the people I meet on the elevator are blessedly free of that capitalistic edge and are more interested in peace and quiet, which works for me. I'm free to work on the Phaistos Disk in a quiet environment. If I'm not working on it I'm thinking about it, turning it over in my mind trying to grasp what the artist was preserving in clay. It's an oasis which I go to in my mind. The Disk comes from a world that we might perceive to be ideal. Minoan Crete had no military, no churches, no institutions, only a passionate interest in art and in the commercial exportation of their art. For that, they had a fleet of ships that they also liked to use for casually touring around the Aegean in groups. They were tourists at the Great Pyramid.
Even with the advancements I was making that I showed my parents, who were a quite taken aback by it, they were still disappointed that I wasn't ensconced at Hewlett Packard. They had other plans for me and they thought that I was living below my capabilities. I disagree with that but I was certainly living below their expectations. They came from a different world than the one I lived in. They were part of the Greatest Generation, and that generation had big plans for their kids.
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.