Page 13 - BRILLIANT LOST WORLD OF MINOAN CRETE
Incorporated in the Phaistos Disk, as part of the knowledge it preserves, may be the rings of Saturn portrayed as spirals, and a history of the observation of the planet. The pictographs in the spirals might be speculation about the composition of the rings. The artist(s) seems to speculate, from the perspective of the Mediterranean Bronze Age, about the composition of the rings, while at the same time creates a record of the geometry used to build the Great Pyramid. An account seems to be given of astronomers and geometers traveling to the Great Pyramid to observe Saturn, the stars and constellations. Next, according to the history that seems recorded on the disk, the astronomers and geometers went down into the subterranean chamber of the Great Pyramid, perhaps to convene the group.
I like to speculate this way based on my studies of the Disk, while at the same time trying to be guided by
Will Durant's
caution on the approach to knowledge of Minoan Crete via hazardous historical television. When I began publishing my research and various solutions to this fantastic puzzle in 1997, my theories were interesting to me, so I shared them and my solution to the maze puzzle. My solution is embraced by many, contested by others and ridiculed by some. It was ignored by archaeologists for years, studied by anthropologists for years, and has been widely and secretly researched, having slipped in the back door of colleges and universities everywhere.
My solution has been difficult for some to accept because it conflicts with the current view of Minoans as being much less intelligent than we are.
Were the Minoans really less intelligent or could we have devolved so that we cannot even recognize their brilliance? Recently asserted by European researchers that we have lost 14 IQ points over 115 years since the Victorian Age, how many have we lost over 3,600 years since the Mediterranean Bronze Age and the Phaistos Disk? (I sincerely hope we are not systematically swapping IQ points for medical advancement because that seems like a no-win swap, to me.)
Let me just propose a theory that may not be what we want to hear. Suppose we are losing 14 IQ points every 115 years. That means we have lost 440 since the Phaistos Disk was created. Now go back in time another 1,100 years to 2700 BCE when the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built. That makes the total IQ points lost to be 574. That's a lot of smarts to have lost, and with that much extra brain power we probably easily figured out how to build the Great Pyramid without the help of pointy-headed aliens. Or maybe we are the highly devolved aliens that we think did it.
How old is this theory that aliens built the Great Pyramid? We assume it to be part of our modern mythology, but perhaps it is an ancient theory. The Great Pyramid was built at least 1,100 years before the creation of the Phaistos Disk, about 2700 BCE which is also the date of the beginning of the culturally advanced Minoan civilization. The pyramid might be very much older, and the Minoans may have had their own "aliens built it" theory, since it was built in their ancient past.
Perhaps the creator(s) of the Phaistos Disk used the Disk to express an opinion on this theory. If the Phaistos Disk should provide us with an historical account of how the pyramid was built or how the Minoans thought it was built, then this would indicate they possessed much greater intellect than we willingly acknowledge. But they might have lost so much IQ over that 1,100 years, and add to that the fact they had no written history, that they also could have no idea how it was built.
Perhaps we did not lose that many IQ points over that period of time but I bet we lost a lot. So much time has passed since the Great Pyramid was built that it is possible we may be lost in the maze of history with no hope of ever finding our way back out or ever achieving the glory days of the past.
It's a dark vision, I admit, but so is the belief that aliens are responsible for our greatest technological achievements as a species. I believe we did these magnificent things ourselves, but along the way we just forgot how. Also, the aliens that I personally know refuse to take the credit :)
The Disk is one of the most extraordinary artifacts ever discovered, and the Minoan civilization that produced it is one of the most accomplished civilizations ever to have existed on earth, yet so few people know about it compared with how many people know about the ancient Egyptian civilization.
I can offer two explanations for this. One, the Minoan civilization was, and still is, overshadowed by the Egyptian civilization with which it co-existed. Crete is tiny compared with vast Egypt, flourishing isolated on an island off the coast of Egypt, in the middle of the Aegean Sea. Two, the people who know about the Minoan civilization have difficulty accepting the magnitude of its brilliance because it just seems too incredible to be true.
Perhaps the Minoan world causes a case of civilization envy for the observer, and this may also explain the denial. How can there be a 1,200 year-old Bronze Age culture that flourished without war, without politics, without corruption and without murder as a mainstay but instead focused on art, astronomy, architecture, invention, and dancing? Longevity might have something to do with it. First settled in 128,000 BCE, Crete had plenty of time to get it right, and it seems the Minoans did.
Will Durant believed we are arrogant in our perspective on the Minoan civilization that he said was "one of the most artistic civilizations in history," and the more I discover about it, the more I agree with him. By working closely with the Phaistos Disk for so many years I have gained a perspective of my own that makes me in awe of this ancient culture.
Just a look at their civilization, their art, their technology, their science, their architecture, their beliefs, their lifestyle, and their Phaistos Disk, will astonish anyone no matter what they believe about intellect and achievement. My solution to the Phaistos Disk, so difficult for some people to accept because of what it reveals, shows just one incredible accomplishment out of many for this brilliant lost world, lost in more ways perhaps than we are willing to admit.
First settled in 128,000 BCE, Crete achieved its potential with the Minoan civilization. From there came the identification of our constellations, the legendary Maze of Daedalus with Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, the mythology of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and the invocations of the god Dionysus in his biennial festivals and bacchanals.
Just as the Phæacian [Cretan] men are skilled beyond others as mariners, so are the women the most
accomplished at the loom. The goddess Athene has given them much wisdom as
workers, and richest fancy. (Donald Mackenzie, Myths of Crete)
The Cretans had advanced into the later stage of Neolithic culture...and, as it is of special interest to note, clay
and stone spindle whorls, indicating that the art of spinning was well known. (Mackenzie)
The Phaistos Disk was found in 1908 at Phaistos, Crete, beneath the palace in a basement corner accessible by a trap door above. Beside it was a tablet of Linear A (undeciphered) writing of ancient Crete, perhaps explaining it. The palace had been burned to the ground by an intense fire, and this may have fire-hardened the disk.
The Phaistos Disk delivers complex information in a simple and very playful 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.
The dots inside the warrior's shield suggest a connect-the-dots approach of solving the disk puzzle. This is the profitable approach, as it reveals many significant and complex images as well as numerous simple geometries that are concealed on the disk as hidden patterns/pictographs. The geometries, though simple, are not random, as all forms of Euclidean geometry are represented on the disk 1,300 years before Euclid proclaimed them.
It is incredible to me that for over 100 years no one has thought to reveal these hidden geometric images. But the funny thing is, if this disk had been presented to us in the Sunday paper connect-the-dots section, we would have found a lot of the images before breakfast was over. This is because of the power that expectation plays in our thinking and even in what our eyes see.
Archaeologists never expected a connect-the-dots maze puzzle so they never saw it, and the linguists hard at work in their futility to decipher the disk pictographs don't want to see it. Their expectations are for the personal discovery of a hieroglyphic script, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, and they are holding fast to that. Should the disk have nothing at all to do with hieroglyphs, just as Sir Arthur Evans said nearly a century ago, then they have no interest in it.
They pursue their decipherment course as the solution to the disk even though it denies the authority of the man who discovered the entire civilization and it also defies reason. They want to "crack" the disk as though it were an egg, out of which they hope to hatch their fame and fortune. Their approach serves no one except themselves and they use the disk as their personal platform to pontificate.
In my opinion, this is why no one was there before me to offer my solution to the puzzle. I may have been the first person to approach it who had no need for it to be anything other that what it is. And I was also the first bridge player to study it. I brought to the disk a mind trained in pattern recognition by twenty years of playing tournament bridge. And like everyone else, I wasn't expecting patterns but I saw them, anyway.
But this is what makes the disk an intentional puzzle. The patterns are ingeniously concealed, hidden in the spiraling chaos of the pictographs that also conceals the maze itself. Until the patterns are revealed, the disk is indecipherable and the maze is not revealed and solved.
Greece had almost forgotten, though the poet [Homer] had not, that the island [Crete] whose wealth seemed to him even
then so great had once been wealthier still; that it had held sway with a powerful fleet over most of the Aegean and part of mainland Greece; and
that it had developed, a thousand years before the siege of Troy, one of the most artistic civilizations in history. Probably it was this Aegean
culture -- as ancient to him as he is to us -- that Homer recalled when he spoke of a Golden Age in which men had been more civilized, and life more
refined, than in his own disordered time. (Will Durant,
Life of Greece
)
The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, includes nine stars - the seven sisters and their parents, Pleione and Atlas. This Phaistos Disk depiction of the Pleiades shows eight stars. Omitted from the disk is the sister Asterope (top right star), and Atlas, the "father" of the sisters (bottom left star). Included is an additional star to the left and below Merope. Shown on the disk are (beginning top right) Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, Electra, Merope, Alcyone, and Pleione, the "mother" of the Seven Sisters.
The star cluster of the Pleiades, our Seven Sisters, was once, in Egypt, Seven Hathors, whose names had to be remembered by the dead as passwords to enter the heaven of the stars. This perhaps began the notion of afterlife planetary gatekeepers and passwords that preoccupied the minds of the Gnostics in early Common Era Gnosticism, about the time of Jesus.
In ancient Egypt the Pleiades were also known as "Krittikas" and "female judges of mankind." In Hindu mythology, the Pleiades were called Krttika (Sanskrit). In their mythology of this star cluster, the god Murugun was raised by his six sisters known as Krttika.
In Egypt "Ka" meant the spiritual twin of the physical earth self "Ba." The Ba is below on earth and the Ka is above in the stars. Widely suggested is the theory that rituals held inside the Great Pyramid by the priest caste were attempts to reconnect the Ba of the newly deceased with their Ka, the two having been separated at birth. There is, therefore, the possibility that the Minoans, who built no religious temples of their own, reserved the Great Pyramid for the same use.
The Phaistos Disk could represent this ancient and venerable belief system. Side 1 of the disk could be the Ka and Side 2 the Ba. When connected by joining at the matching line segments, the symbol for eternity is produced (horizontal figure 8.) The meaning is obvious, in reference to this religious philosophy. When the Ka and the Ba are joined together, the person becomes eternal.
The fact of orientation links up with the fact that there early arose a close association between various gods and the sun and various fixed stars. Whatever mass of people outside were thinking, the priests of the temples were beginning to link the movements of those heavenly bodies with the power in the shrine. They were thinking about the gods they served and thinking new meanings into them. They were brooding upon the mystery of the stars. It very natural for them to suppose that these shining bodies, so irregularly distributed and circling so solemnly and silently, must be charged with portents to mankind…This clear evidence of astronomical inquiry and of a development of astronomical ideas is the most obvious, but only the most obvious evidence of the very considerable intellectual activities that went on within the temple precincts in ancient times…Outside the temples the world was still a world of blankly illiterate and unspeculative human beings, living from day to day entirely for themselves. (Wells, Chapter XVI, The Outline of History)
Page 1 - Antique Science of Containment
| Many Hidden Patterns
Page 2 - The Tablet
| Who Created It?
| How to Solve It
Page 3 - Constellation Argo - The Ferry
| Khufu Ship
| Rope Truss
Page 4 - North Star
| Enochian Language
Page 5 - Great Pyramid Exterior
Page 6 - Pyramid Interior
| Pyramid Goddess
Minoan Symbols for Star and Constellation
Page 10 - Maze Solution
| Phi Spiral
Page 11 - Conclusion
| Unidentified Patterns
| Ships of the Sky
Page 12 - Minoan Calendars
| Minoan LuniSolar Calendar
Page 13 - Brilliant Lost World
Page 14 - Origins of the Phaistos Disk
| How Was it Made?
Page 16 - Pictographs Numbered
| Entire Inscription
Page 17 - It's Full of Stars!
| Hoax Defense
| Infamous Letter
Page 18 - Galileo on Philosophy
| The Crater of the Whorl
Page 19 - The Phaistos Disk
| Hidden Patterns
| Emerald Table
Astronomer-Artist
| As Above, So Below
| Planeism
Page 20 - Crete Invents Modern Astrology
sexagesimal System
| Phi Spiral
| Astronomical Ages
Birthing Stone of Zeus
| Watcher Unseen
Page 21 - Phaistos Disk Color Animations
Page 22 - Phaistos Disk Maze of Daedalus
Page 23 - Animated Geometry
Page 25 - Great Pyramid on the Phaistos Disk
Page 26 - Constellation Argo Sail Backwards for 2,300 Years
Page 27 - North Star, Sirius, the Planets and Stars
Page 28 - 3,600 Year-Old Animation
Page 29 - Phaistos Disk Clay Pictographs
Page 30 - Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus
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.
Therefore, of course we ascribe this monumental technological advance - the construction of the Great Pyramid - to alien intervention. Because from our perspective of dumb, how else could it have been achieved? After all, are we not the greatest intellect on the planet, the very smartest version of humanity to ever have lived? We would rather believe in aliens than to consider we have lost the ability to even imagine how such accomplishments were achieved. Sometimes, it takes time traveling into the past to see just how little progress we've made and - say it ain't so - just how backwards we actually have become. And if we travel far enough into the past we may actually meet ourselves where we are right now.
According to this "IQ-loss math," they had lost 134 IQ points since the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built. This pictograph on the Phaistos Disk that resembles a UFO might be their idea of how the pyramid was built.
One of the pictographs is that of a man, seemingly a warrior, holding a shield containing tiny circles in the shape of a hexagram. This is a form of miniaturization of the entire disk, as the shield is two-sided and the dots can be visually connected to reveal the hexagram. I think it also implies a man created the Phaistos Disk. The puzzle on the disk itself is not so simple, although the method of solution is the same, because the dots or pictographs on the disk are in a crowd of pictographs, and this chaos complicates the puzzle.
8 "Lion" pictographs, side 2, dotted. Could this be the Pleiades?
Perhaps the Pleiades was originally eight stars, and the "Lion" pictographs that mark the stars represent the Egyptian lion-headed goddess, Sekmet, whose name means "power," from the Egyptian word "sekhem." Associated with the goddess Hathor, Sekmet is often shown wearing a "sun disk" on her head. Possibly, the Phaistos Disk is an upcycled version of the Egyptian sun disk and Sekmet's crown.
Argo Sails Backwards for 2,300 Years!
Linear "A" for Argothic?
| Egyptian Influences
Archaeoastronomy Site
| Vault Technology
Minoan Zodiac Stellar Calendar
| Minoan Sothic Calendar
Minoan 366-Day Year Calendar
Wrong Motivation
| Conclusion
Remembering the Whorl
| Planeism
|Tree of Life
The Arktype Astrology
| Waking Whorl and Dream Whorl
Daedalus, Cunning Artificer
| Palace of Knossos
Daedalus Invents Images
Page 24 - Shield of Achilles
Page 30 - Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus