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

The Star Sirius configuration is created by connecting with lines the 15 Shield pictographs containing a hexagram in the center. This accounts for 5 (pentagram), 6 (hexagram), and 7 (heptagram, heptagon). Next comes 8, which is revealed by overlapping the connecting, matching line segments on the two spirals of the Disk to create a figure 8, as above. This indicates the creator of the Disk might have had a theory that the geometry force holding the universe together is complex and much more advanced than that which binds the stars and planets together.

Sirius is the brightest star in the sky because of its proximity to our solar system. Sirius is the location of the Ogdoad, the eighth sphere, their concept equivalent to our idea of heaven. Perhaps this is where our symbol for infinity originally comes from, and the Phaistos Disk also corresponds to that idea of the Ogdoad and represents it, with its eight spheres and its continuum concept. Turned on its side it becomes the modern symbol for infinity.

The Phaistos Disk was excavated in the ruins of Phaistos, Crete, a Mediterranean Bronze Age city, in 1908. It is the most famous maze puzzle in the world except for one - the Maze of Daedalus. It is also the only disk of its kind to survive. I believe the Phaistos Disk is a pattern recognition puzzle from the Bronze Age, in the sense that if the patterns are not recognized the artifact can't be comprehended. The patterns involve plane geometry, calendar applications, and a pictograph language description of Minoan Crete.

The creator of the maze puzzle made a two-sided clay disk, rather than two disks with one side each of impressions. Putting impressions on both sides of one disk kept the puzzle intact for 3,600 years. The pictographs on the disk were etched into it. 48 unique pictographs are scattered across the disk for a total of 240 impressions. 37 pictographs were repeated, 11 were not.

The etched pictographs made it possible for the creator of the maze puzzle to present the disk puzzle for solution, and then when the solution was impossible to find, the creator could have stamped each side of the disk into wet sand in a certain pattern so that the solution was suddenly easy to see. It must have been amazing for the people who saw it. It amazes me endlessly. And that also is a good way to describe the disk - an endless figure 8 maze.

But the perishable nature of the materials on which picture-writing, having for most part only a temporary value, was usually wrought has been fatal to the survival of primitive European pictographs on any large scale. If we had before us the articles of bark and hide and wood of early man in this quarter of the globe or could still see the tattoo marks on his skin we should have a very different idea of the part once played by picture-writing on European soil. As it is, it is 'right' that the imagination should supply the deficiency of existing evidence. (Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phonecian Script Arthur J. Evans, M.A., F.S.A.)

Did the world-famous Minoan inventor Daedalus create this disk? People might have come from miles around to see it. If only we could look back in time, back through the stars, we might see the civilization of Minoan Crete and the people arriving at Knossos Palace during the festival of Dionysis. Perhaps the disk was as famous then as it is now. In fact, there is some chance it is the lost Maze of Daedalus, created by the famous genius himself. People would marvel at it as Daedalus showed them this maze puzzle, flipping it from side to side so they could see it, challenging them to find the solution to the maze. If they solved it they perhaps would win a prize. If not, they might pay to see the solution, which was easy enough to display.

Daedalus would stamp one side into the sand and then stamp the other side beside it, overlapping the line segments as shown above. Then he would trace with his finger the spirals around and around to show the uninterrupted movement from the center of one spiral to the center of another. The reenactment of the creation of the disk and the people who came to see it is included in The Shadow Breakers, a work of fiction by this author that incorporates 22 images of the Phaistos Disk.

I think it's considered indecipherable because scholars approach it as though it's hieroglyphics but, as Sir Arthur Evans said nearly 100 years ago, it's pictographs or picture writing inscribed into clay. Although Evans was not aware of it, nor anyone else until the presentation of my solution, this method of pictograph inscription creates a pattern recognition puzzle that can be solved. Displayed on this web site is my solution to this ingenious puzzle.

The two sides placed side-by-side this way show how to position the bottom disk (side 2) onto the top disk (side 1) at the matching vertical line segments to create the Minoan wave spiral. You can't solve it by leaving it intact as a two-sided disk unless your imagination is pretty good, so apparently the puzzle, during its day, was created by pressing the disk into the sand, probably wet sand.

Although most photographs of the disk create the appearance of raised pictographs, they are instead carved into the disk, so that pressing the disk into wet sand would create raised pictographs to present the puzzle, and then lines could be drawn in the sand to reveal the hidden, large pictographs. I believe it was such a famous puzzle that it became known thoughout time as the Maze of Daedalus.