These similarities may be only coincidence, but there are other similarities as well. Both appear to be mazes; Maze of Daedalus is a square maze and Phaistos Disk is a round maze, and both originate in Minoan Crete, one as legend and the other as artifact. (Left, Minoan coin with square maze and English alphabet.)

The Phaistos Disk, located (in the Herakleion Museum) but not explained, is probably the most famous maze in the world except for the Maze of Daedalus, explained but not located. In the Phaistos Disk we have the artifact but not the narrative. In the Maze of Daedalus we have the narrative but not the artifact. In the Maze of Daedalus narrative, the Greek hero Theseus was put into the maze and then challenged to find his way back out under pressure of being eaten by the Minotaur. Fortunately for him, the Minotaur's half-sister Ariadne helped him by leaving a thread for him to follow out of the maze after he killed the Minotaur.

The idea of the thread is visible in the Phaistos Disk solution (below) as the winding spiral that covers both sides of the disk and can be followed from center to center like a thread.

As I sat in the library that day I wondered, "Did Daedalus create the Phaistos Disk, and is the disk the Maze of Daedalus?" It seems possible to me that something found as an artifact today could be so remarkable when it was created that an entire mythology could grow up around it and endure for thousands of years. The mythology could have passed down to us while the artifact that engendered it was lost. If the artifact was later found, then it might be possible to connect it to the ancient legend surrounding it. And as it involves Daedalus, the world's greatest inventor, then it could be possible the Phaistos Disk was his most famous invention from which his legend grew.

Daedalus lived in a culture that rose from a neolithic condition via technology with the smelting of iron, the importation of metals, the use of bronze and the development of boats and ships that sailed all over the Mediterranean. They apparently traded with various countries, including Egypt where murals have been discovered recently that depict the Minoans bringing gifts to the pharaoh. The Minoan culture was replete with brilliant artisans.

Was Daedalus the creator of the Phaistos Disk, or was Daedalus the collective name of the brilliant Bronze Age artisans who lived and worked back then? Perhaps Daedalus means Inspiration. They were so incredibly creative that it makes me wonder if Crete is the root word for create. They created palaces, designed mazes, made bronze armor and weapons, painted beautiful murals, made exquisite pottery, designed drainage systems, built trading ships, paved their roads with shells and rocks and became advanced astronomers. They were very artistically advanced, with the creation of ceramics and carved ivory, tile mosaics and mazes, and rudimentary hieroglyphic writing.

And they had a fascination with bulls. Not just at Knossos, where the palace roof tops were trimmed in bull's horns and the walls display images of bull sports, but also other places like Mallia, where the palace is designed like the head of a bull (left). And then, of course, there is the legend of the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-human creature contained by Daedalus inside the famous maze.

As I began my quest for Daedalus and his maze and set my sails for a journey into the past, I tried to heed the advice of Will Durant, who said of Minoan Crete in his The Life of Greece:

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.

But no matter how much hazardous historical television we engage upon, will we ever understand how a civilization can perceive something special about a dog scratching its fleas?

Phaistos Disk pictograph and Minoan cylinder seals of dogs scratching

Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, would not have been successful with the Phaistos Disk had he taken this cautious approach, and I won't do it either. I will just try not to overlay the ideas of my civilization onto theirs, and good luck with that!

Another mystery surrounding the disk is how it was made. Perhaps Daedalus means "cunning artificer" because he could invent not just the thing itself but the way to make it, as well. Daedalus was so clever that he is said to have invented images. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of his day and even more so. Daedalus was inventing during the Mediterranean Bronze Age when, from our perspective, so many inventions seem possible. Everything was new then, relative to da Vinci's day. For Daedalus it must have been truly a world of opportunities, a wide-open vista of possibilities for the inventor.

Daedalus (=cunning artificer) was a sort of personified summary of mechanical skill. (H.G. Wells)

It is difficult, however, when reading all the mythology and legends associated with Daedalus, to state exactly what he invented. A list of his inventions begins with a lurid tale that Greek adults perhaps told in saunas to pass the time. Poseidon, god of the sea and special god of Plato's Atlantis, presented King Minos with a white bull and Queen Pasiphae (Persephone) with a problem, which Daedalus solved. The king's wife is supposed to have lusted after the bull! Pasiphae asked Daedalus, the palace architect, to design a bed for the mating to take place. Daedalus complied and the result of the mating was the Minotaur, half-bull, half-human (right).

Daedalus also invented the maze in which innocent young Greeks were fed to the Minotaur wherein they wandered lost until eaten. In another variation of the purpose of his maze, he built it for King Minos of Crete in order to contain the Minotaur, who was the queen's son. He also is credited with inventing attachable feathered wings, held together with strings and wax, so that humans could fly (pictograph left). With these wings he and his son Icarus escaped his own inescapable maze by flying out of it. When Icarus flew too high, the sun melted the wax. (Right, Minoan Coin with Minotaur and English alphabet)

Centuries passed and the legendary status of Daedalus the inventor grew. The stories surrounding him became unrelated to his inventions, but beyond inventing a maze, a bedchamber, wings and images, Daedalus cannot be said to have invented anything that would justify his extraordinary status as the world's greatest inventor. The invention of images, however, would certainly qualify this inventor for legendary status, but it seems his reputation rests on his most famous invention, the Maze of Daedalus, which is lost in time. We have only mythology to tell us what his maze was and what its purpose was, but mythology is storytelling of the highest order and not recorded history at all. We just know he invented an incredible maze in Crete during a period of time before written history.

Had he invented a way of recording a history of his time, so that he could record some of the events and some of his inventions, that would be very helpful, but he also would have to invent a way to do it and a way to preserve it for thousands of years. If he was truly worthy of his legendary status as inventor, he would have done that. This cunning artificer could invent not just the thing itself but the way to make it, as well. The Phaistos Disk could be his greatest invention, the one for which he is best known and which records his other inventions including how he made it and why he is credited with inventing images.

If the Phaistos Disk is the Maze of Daedalus, then the great inventor deserves his star status and more because the disk may record his inventions that seem now lost to us. They included images, telescopes, binoculars, textbooks in clay, calendars, a printing press, a kiln, mazes, an historical record, geometries, constellations, world-disks, and even a new world-view of an old world. And on this disk invention he may have recorded the second most cataclysmic event in the last 5,000 years, the Minoan eruption and tsunami. He may also have realized spatial relativity and created an object to demonstrate it (left). If so, it has taken nearly 4,000 years for his inventions and ideas to become known because that is about how long the Phaistos Disk was lost.

The Phaistos Disk may not be the Maze of Daedalus, but nothing will ever come as close to it as this disk. I am also encouraged to embrace this theory because it is so much easier to talk about the Phaistos Disk if we allow it to be the Maze of Daedalus and if we interpret the mythology of Daedalus literally and allow that he actually lived in Minoan Crete.

Read my fictional account of Daedalus' participation in the Phaistos Disk and the creation of the Maze of Daedalus

The tile mosaic (top of page) portrays the maze and the ancient Minoan legend of Theseus and the Minotaur by the use of continuous representation. This ancient narrative device (supposed to have originated in Mesopotamia) is used by artists to tell a story with their art by the depiction of successive scenes within a single composition.

According to the ancient story, the maze was inescapable, full of paths leading nowhere and very dangerous. The only way to escape the maze was to put on wings and fly out of it. At the center of this tile mosaic is the Maze of Daedalus, which is also a truncated pyramid and a pyramid with a interior view. Inside the pyramid and in the center of the maze, Theseus is battling the Minotaur.

According to mythology, Theseus (Iasius) was one of the mythical Argonauts, along with two other Curetes (Cretans), Heracles and Idas. They were three of the original five divine Curetes, including Paeonaeus and Epimedes, who established the civilization of Crete. They were called Minyae, descendants of King Minyas, from which the word Minos, as in King Minos, may be derived. (Minoan is the name given the civilization by excavator Sir Arthur Evans.)

With their captain Jason (Aeson) and 43 (or so) other Argonauts, Theseus/Iasius pursued the Golden Fleece (above left) belonging to the ram (second left) that had been sacrificed to Zeus. (Right, Minoan Bead-seal showing Theseus battling the Minotaur)

Theseus also appears on the tile mosiac in the scene, top of page, left, in the couple who are most likely Theseus and Ariadne and who are turning a wheel. To the right on the mosaic is Ariadne, perhaps sitting and waiting for Theseus to finish his epic battle. Left is my concept of where she might be sitting, on the bottom steps of the stairs leading to the Royal Apartments in the Palace of Knossos. Below the palace was a labyrinthine plumbing system that many speculate was the origin for the Maze of Daedalus myth.

Above the pyramid on the mosaic, they are disembarking from a ship, apparently after the battle has ended and they have left Crete together. The ship may also be the constellation Argo, the boat used by Theseus/Iasius and Jason/Aeson to sail the heaven-ocean in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. In wordplay, when you combine these two names - Jason and Iasius - you get Jasius, which is nearly Jesus, son of god or Ja's son (Jason), Jah being the familiar form of Jehovah. This designates them both as immortals. (What was the Minoan name for god?)

Perhaps the idea portrayed in the tile mosaic is that Theseus/Iasius left the Argo long enough to meet Ariadne and battle the Minotaur, and his defeat of this bull-being caused the Minoan civilization to blossom and flourish. Not so easy to explain as this Maze of Daedalus is the Phaistos Disk.

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.