Jonas: When (first time) did you learn about Phaistos Disk and why did you decide to research it? (Jonas Skendelis, webmaster, Global Lithuanian Net)
Jonas: When (first time) did you learn about Phaistos Disk and why did you decide to research it? (Jonas Skendelis, webmaster, Global Lithuanian Net)
Puzzles and mysteries, especially ancient mysteries and mysticism, always intrigued me. Coming home from the tournament, I went right away to the library to research the Great Pyramid of Giza, to find something more about its purpose as an archaeoastronomy site. Seems the ancient Egyptians used the Great Pyramid for their 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 quickly for leads.
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 Phaistos Disk, a two-sided 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. Written above it were the words, "Who can read the Phaistos Disk?"
I was able to read the disk by taking an unorthodox approach involving the language of geometry, astronomy and mathematics. I discovered that the pictographs, rather than being hieroglyphs, are picture writing placeholders for geometric forms and images which, when revealed, are five additional, larger pictographs. These new, unseen pictographs seem to provide long sought-after answers to questions regarding the Great Pyramid, the geometry that built it, and how it was used as an astronomical observatory in identifying and naming the constellations.
I've loved reading your research, it's fascinating. You have a great mind for pictographs! (Heidi Bosley)
Could I have done this had I not been a tournament bridge player? Maybe not. Equally valuable was my master's degree focus in mythology and saga. Not realizing it, I had prepared for the opportunity in graduate school and when it came along I jumped on it. And nearly everything bridge developed in me was valuable in my approach to solving some of the Phaistos Disk, a brilliantly conceived artifact that is, I think, an ancient, pattern recognition maze puzzle.
You can play bridge and other card games like Hearts and Spades and Whist without being good at visualization and pattern recognition but you will lose to the people who are. Same thing is true in solving the Phaistos Disk. I convinced myself that twenty-two years of solving bridge hands, combined with a graduate degree and education in ancient mythology, gave me a better chance of solving this new puzzle than anyone else even though it was world-famous 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?
Before I researched the disk I evaluated my chances of success by studying the approach of the people making decipherment attempts. All of them who try to decipher it, and can't, all believe the same thing, the pictographs on the disk are like Egyptian hieroglyphs; they just need to be deciphered. Like a field of bridge players all taking the same wrong approach to the play of a hand, the decipherers never veer from their wrong approach. 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. I have been that one person and so I thought I could be that one person with the Phaistos Disk as well.
The decipherers all ignore the spirals on the disk as having any purpose other than separating the chaos of 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 bearing.
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 is bridge the two hands in a common cause.
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. 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 the fifty-nine that followed it.
There are a large number of claims of decipherment of the Phaistos Disc. Claire Grace Watson, M.S.T., 1993 (interpretation as pattern recognition maze); (Wikipedia)
Most people's approach to the disk is to glance over it and start guessing, but bridge taught me to take an analytical approach to a puzzle, so counting was how I began. Apparently, no one had ever done it this way, or if they had they never published it. Even Sir Author Evans, who discovered the entire civilization, didn't have time to break it down like this, but he was busy doing other things like writing a massive five-volume encyclopedia of the Minoan civilization, and several incredible books. He identified the glyphs covering the disk as pictographs, not hieroglyphs, and he freehanded most of them and made some guesses about what they might be. He might have guessed better had he benefit of tracing paper and a copy machine as I had.
Here is my initial approach. Mathematics is apparent on the disk, and 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 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 fired in a civilization of sun-baked pottery. Beside the disk was a tablet of Linear A (undeciphered) writing of ancient Crete, perhaps explaining it.
Imagine being one of these "scientists" and living so near the Great Pyramid, and so much closer to the time of its construction, that you could have known how it was built and how it was used. What if you had been inside it and underneath it as a select member of a mystery cult studying early astronomy, geometry and math, and what if you were so inventive you figured out a way to record all that on the Phaistos Disk, and then perhaps you fire-hardened the disk in an Egyptian pottery factory to preserve it? If you will think along these lines you can eliminate the 20 years of work and research I invested to solve this puzzle. I had no idea about all of this when I set out to solve it and, fortunately for me unlike so many others, I was not a linquist so I had no need for it to be decipherable hieroglyphics. It could be whatever it is.
Hidden images on the Phaistos Disk are difficult to perceive, obviously, as I am the first one to see them, but I took the time to trace the disk and make an exact copy of both sides, multi-duplicating all the pictographs and taking care to place them exactly as I saw them on the disk. In the process of doing that I saw much more than all the others who did not bother to work this closely with it.
Below are my exact tracings of side 1 and 2, color-coded so the patterns in chaos are easier to see. This shows the Phaistos Disk as it would look if the artist had access to Photoshop rather than just clay and the potter's wheel. I recreated the disk digitally in color since I know how and have the software to do it. Interesting how this artifact is over 3,600 years old but colorized the way it looks like a product of Disney studios.
Now the disk appears more fluid and defined, less chaotic, but you still need an approach to help you see the invisible images. You might take my first approach, which is everyone's first approach, of going around and around the spirals. This will only make you dizzy and cause you to have strange dreams, but I recommend it anyway, the dreams being well worth having.
When I found the book in the library containing the disk image, I took it home to see if I could recognize any other patterns and I spent days trying to read the disk. I turned the spirals around and around trying to read them, as though the pictographs in single file formed one long sentence or told a story in a spiral. They do but not as hieroglyphs, as all the linquists decipherers are hoping for, but as picture writing. A pictograph is an ideogram, conveying its meaning through what it resembles.
The Phaistos Disk 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 using picture writing, but unlike hiergoplyphs that tell a story using alphabetic composition, the pictographs convey ideas by what they resemble. In the case of the Phaistos Disk their locations are specific placeholders to anchor images and/or geometries that create even larger pictographs conveying even larger ideas.
Take this link back to the pictographs on the first page and imagine them as a language of groups of ideas. You can see how the pictographs, assigned individual meanings, become their own unique language within the context of the Phaistos Disk.
Staring into the Phaistos Disk for so long without knowing the star was there connected me to the ancient ideas and people of this Aegean world who convened in the pyramid. I flew into them via the universe's power of the falcon god Horus, a function of the subconscious mind, becoming a member of their Egyptian mystery school by being there.
In the beginning of these experiences, I dreamed I was exploring the Great Pyramid inside and outside, walking through the tunnels and visiting the chambers, going outside and climbing to the top, then looking up into the stars. Inside the pyramid I went down deep into the subterranean chamber and I could touch the great stones as I walked. They seemed so real, so cool. I went down into the chamber beneath the pyramid and was not alone down there. Others were with me, hazy unrecognizable people. Who were they and why were we here? My solution to the puzzle was connected to the dreams, as out of the disk came the dreams and out of the dreams came the solution to the disk.
At first the dreams were chaotic like the disk, but colorful and exciting, and the more I perceived about the disk and the less confusing it seemed to me, the more coherent the dreams became until finally they were brilliantly lucid and spiritually elevated. More of these hazy people showed up to accompany me and guide me through the dreams. It was a world I loved to visit, a place in my mind I longed to be, a place I still visit.
"The interview is wonderful !!!" (Jonas Skendelis, Global Lithuanian Net)
Page 1 - Ancient Puzzle Solved | Brilliant Ancient World Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2023,
Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T., U.S. Copyright and under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, All rights reserved.
Claire: In 1993 I came home to Atlanta from the North American Bridge Championships where I played well in the Reisinger, competing with a lot of national and world champions and other great bridge players. In bridge, one of the things you do is visualize the suit patterns you can't see based on the ones you can see, then you bid and play the hand according to that. Because my mind had been developed that way through the years and was working like that when I first saw the Phaistos Disk, I could perceive hidden patterns. I was so fascinated by it, I was captured in its spirals and stopped playing bridge entirely, except for a few times, for nearly 20 years.
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. That's when it occurred to me, what if I could read 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."
VALUABLE BACKGROUND IN BRIDGE
I think you have decoded The Phaistos Disk
(Adolfo Rios Pita Giurfa, giurfa.com)
COMMON APPROACH
The artifact is terracotta pottery, about 6-1/4" diameter, only a litte 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 pressed into the 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.
Each side of the disk is a circle containing a 5-ring spiral. (Phaistos Disk sides 1 and 2, left, pictographs removed.) Early astronomy involved the study of the properties of a circle and the geometry of a sphere, for use in astronomy. This is the antique science of "containment of geometrical arrangements," (above, right) nearly lost now but building pyramids and civilizations way back then. I think the disk preserves part of this antique science that is thought to have been used in the construction of the Great Pyramid.
CAN YOU READ THE PHAISTOS DISK?
Where hieroglyphs gain meaning by successive placement of the glyphs and represent words, pictographs gain meaning by selective grouping of the signs and represent ideas.
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 and chopped it into small pieces with his axe, then threw it into the Nile River where the pieces were eaten by the sharp-snout fish and the Nile crab.
SELF-HYPNOSIS
And what about the spirals? I would study the spirals all day, spinning them and trying to read the pictographs from the inside of the spiral out and from the outside in as was debated, then at night when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I would seem to fly through a spiraling tunnel. As I fell asleep, I awakened in dreamworld where I was a Greek warrior carrying a sword and shield. (left, disk pictograph) In these dreams I was hurrying people huddled in their homes out into the boats as a volcano was erupting. Greek columns were on fire, buildings were crumbling and a tidal wave was coming. These dreams and many others kept occuring, becoming more real and more fun. Night after night, for months and then years, the dreams kept me interested in the disk, and the disk kept me traveling throughout the universe in dreams. My second life began, the one I live in dreamtime, a realm of places and people and creatures and things just out of this world but normal to me now.
Page 2 - Interview with Jonas | Valuable Background in Bridge
Common Approach | Can You Read the Phaistos Disk?
Self-Hypnosis
Part 3 - Dream Perspective | Great Pyramid, Exterior
Two Pyramids?
Part 4 - Great Pyramid, Interior & Subterranean Chamber
Phaistos Disk Maze of Daedalus
Part 5 - Great Star in the Sky
Part 6 - Constellation Argo
Page 7 - Pre-Euclidean Geometry | Minoan Fashion
Page 8 - Solve the Maze | Minoan Pottery
Page 9 - Minoan Calendars | Minoan Lunisolar Calendar
Zodiac Stellar Calendar | Minoan Sothic Calendar
Minoan 366-Day Year | How Was the Phaistos Disk Made?
Page 10 - Phaistos Disk Pictographs
Page 11 - Fishing Lessons | Big Game Hunter
First Woman Airline Pilot | The Stearman | The AT-6
Page 12 - Brilliant Musician | Debutant Career | English Teacher
Booted Out of School | Hostess Career
Page 13 - Crash Landing | Marauder Pilot | Bridge Boyfriend
Dedicated to Billy | Money Bridge Pro
Archaeoastronomer Career