MATCHING PICTOGRAPHS CONNECTED WITH LINES
PRODUCE LARGER PICTOGRAPHS

Bronze Age geometry theology may have passed from Minoan Crete into mysticism as the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus and then eventually became known as Sacred Geometry.

...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)

Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus?

The number One The Point within the Circle	The number Two Diameter The Cross within the Circle	The number Three Triangle The Hearth of the Universe
The number Four The Square within the Circle	The number Five Pentagon, pentagram	The number Six Hexagon, hexagram
The number Seven Heptagon, heptagram	The number Eight Octagon, octagrams	The number Nine Enneagon, enneagrams
The number Ten Dekagon, dekagrams	The number Eleven Endekagon, endekagrams	The number Twelve Dodekagon, dodekagrams

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, randomly 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.

A pictograph is an ideogram, conveying its meaning through what it resembles. 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.

Unlike hieroglyphs that tell a story using alphabetic composition, the pictographs convey ideas by what they resemble. Where script is a language that can be deciphered and read, a pictograph is a symbol complete within itself that represents an idea or a thing. Like an ideogram, it represents an object or idea but not a word or a speech sound. 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.

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.

CONTINUOUS REPRESENTATION

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.

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) (Phaistos Disk puzzle solution by Claire Grace Watson, M.S.T., touring Phaistos, Crete)

IMPERFECT SPIRAL MAKES IT PERFECT
How many triangles do you see below?

(Phaistos Disk, both sides connected at the matching line segments and all four Mother/Isis/Nurse matching pictographs connected with lines.)

"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 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)

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)

ALL PHAISTOS DISK HIDDEN PATTERNS

Revealed by connecting with lines the matching pictographs

This Phaistos Disk pre-Euclidean geometry, 1,300 years before Euclid, became the basis of his Elements, Books I-IV and VI and demonstrates the antique science we know as "containment of geometrical arrangements." This "earthly" science was extended to early astronomy which involved the study of the properties of a circle (containment) and the geometry of a sphere (geometrical arrangements), for use in astronomy.

For the Minoans, these "geometrical arrangements" became their identification of the constellations that are "contained" by the sphere of the circling heavens above. The Phaistos Disk may be a record of this science, a key part of the geometry theology and number philosophy that may have inspired the construction of the Great Pyramid for a closer look at the stars. The artist(s) of the Phaistos Disk takes it one step further into miniaturization art, and in so doing perserves for us the entirety of the intellectual brilliance of the age that laid the foundation of Western science and religion. Here is written Galileo's "mathematical language and symbols...without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of...that great book which ever is before our eyes...the universe."

SEE THE HIDDEN IMAGES IN MOTION

See the full display of this solution.

Phaistos Disk, colorized - Bottom disk overlaps top disk at the matching vertical line segments, becomes a vertical Minoan wave spiral and Figure 8 Shield

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)

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)

NEXT - PUZZLE SOLUTION 2

SITEMAP - BOOK INDEX - HOME

Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2016, 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.