This is a Bronze Age puzzle and the most famous "undeciphered" artifact in archaeology. Treat it like Egyptian hieroglyphs and try to "decipher" it and get nowhere. Treat it like a puzzle and solve it. The Phaistos Disk is the oldest known "connect-the-dots" puzzle. Connect the matching pictographs like dots to reveal the 8 hidden, significant pictographs. This puzzle solution shows a bow-forward sailing Constellation Argo which means it has been sailing backwards on constellation maps for 2,300 years.
Jason and the Argonauts sailed the Argo about 600 years after the wave-tossed Argo on the Phaistos Disk that is not drawn backwards because it is the original version, logically sailing bow-forward. It has been sailing illogically stern-forward on constellation maps for the last 2,300 years, thanks perhaps to Johannes Hevelius' constellation map of 1642 CE, influenced by Aratos (310-245 BCE), who famously wrote:
"Sternforward Argo by the Great Dog's tail
"...The whole symbolic evocation rests upon the supposed, and in the end actual, correspondence of things, on the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm as intuitively understood by the mind and visually by the eye..." (Introduction, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt, Manfred Lurker, Thames and Hudson, publishers, 1974.)
We know about the Khufu Ship because it was excavated in modern times, but could the Minoans have known about the Khufu Ship in 1600 BCE while it was still buried? Perhaps it was part of their mythology involving the Great Pyramid. This pictograph
"The Khufu ship is an intact full-size vessel from Ancient Egypt that was sealed into a pit in the Giza pyramid complex at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2500 BC....The history and function of the ship are not precisely known." Is it possible the Great Pyramid and the Khufu ship together represent the constellation Argo as shown above on the Phaistos Disk (below, right)? Perhaps the idea behind the construction of the pyramid and the ship was to mirror the constellation on earth because it was the ancient Egyptians' idea of the location of "heaven" and also their method of the afterlife journey in traveling there. In Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, the triangular face of the pyramid is the hieroglyphic for star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major.
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.
Seen at the prow of the Argo pictograph is the pilot, the star 'Kanobus' (Canopus), or 'Pilot'-- from whom, they say, the star got its name." (Plutarch in Thrice-Greatest Hermes, G.R.S. Mead) Osiris is the General and Kanobus is the Pilot. Canopus is the second brightest star in the sky after Sirius. Perhaps a person might make the afterlife journey in the Khufu ship to Argo to become one of the immortal oarsman in this ship, and from this came the mythology of Jason and the Argonauts, the idea being to take a place in the boat, take up the oar and become one of the Argonauts after death.
This way of thinking, this idea of the afterlife world being located in a constellation, may seem foreign to us because of our distance in consciousness from the ancient Egyptians, but from this way of thinking comes our idea of heaven as being "up there" in the stars. Also, their idea of the world below as a mirror image of the world above may have been based on their ideas regarding geometry. One of those ideas was the concept of:
"Duat, the realm of the dead. The Duat is the realm of the [good] god Osiris and the residence of other gods and supernatural beings. It is the region through which the sun god Ra travels from west to east during the night [in his evening boat], and where he battled [evil] Apep [Lord of Chaos}. It also was the place where people's souls went after death for judgement, though that was not the full extent of the afterlife. Burial chambers formed touching-points between the mundane world and the Duat, and spirits could use tombs to travel back and forth from the Duat." Could the air shafts in the Great Pyramid be tunnels created to assist the souls in traveling back and forth from the Duat? This could explain the necessity of their alignment with certain stars, the stars representing specific realms of the Duat. The Great Pyramid would therefore not be a tomb but a massive spiritual technology based on the Sacred Science and beliefs regarding how the soul navigates in the afterlife to its natural destination -- the constellation realm of the gods. This would explain why no Pharaoh was found buried there, making the so-called coffin in the pyramid only symbolic rather than functional. It is a tomb for souls, rather than bodies, used by the priest caste and the pharaohs, its design based on the Sacred Science to assist travel back and forth between the realms. Perhaps these ancient people perceived the constellation Argo/Khufu Ship as a vehicle of travel between these worlds.
This would be a remarkable "Science of the Afterlife." Where we have faith alone regarding the afterlife, they developed an entire science around it and implemented their ideas with geometry because that was part of their religion -- their Sacred Science.
"The spiritual world of the ancient Egyptians is not immediately understandable by the western civilizations of the
twentieth century...We may find it ridiculous for artists to represent the sky as a cow, or for a beetle to be venerated as a symbol of the sun
god, but in past ages, among peoples having a mythical view of the world, the formative principle was not of logic but of an outlook governed by
images...The whole symbolic evocation rests upon the supposed, and in the end actual, correspondence of things, on the relationship between
microcosm and macrocosm as intuitively understood by the mind and visually by the eye...The ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, and to some
extent the Greeks, used images; their view of the world was a comprehensive one."
Is drawn; for hers is not a usual course,
But backward turned she comes, as vessels do
When sailors have transposed the crooked stern
On entering harbour; all the ship reverse,
And gliding backward on the beach it grounds.
Sternforward thus is Jason's Argo drawn."
Minoan astronomers would have a laugh! 
Jason and the Argonauts pursue the Golden Fleece, composed entirely of Phaistos Disk Pictographs
, along with the larger, hidden constellation Argo pictograph on the Disk (above), seems to imply knowledge of it. (The Boat/Argo pictograph could mean, "Beneath the Pyramid is a boat.") These ancient people considered the correspondences of things to be revelatory, so they would elevate to divine status a pictograph that reprsents a boat, a ferry, a constellation, a journey, a pyramid with a boat beneath it.
"...A symbol has manifold significance and therefore its origin and purpose cannot often be explained satisfactorily. Sometimes the symbol seems to contradict itself. There are, in fact, symbols which refer to both poles of existence: life and death, good and evil." (Introduction, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egyptx, Manfred Lurker, Thames and Hudson, publishers, 1974.)
"Lo! I am Khepera at dawn, Ra at high noon, and Tum at eventide." 
We may not understand why they thought like this but we still retain vestiges of what they thought, and this becomes one of our connections to them though they seem lost in time from us. Regardless the distance in space and time between us, we share the commonality of a rational mind that intuitively looks for patterns as a way of identifying and comprehending things.
If we can find the patterns in chaos, then are we not followers in the mighty footsteps of the sun god Ra and is not Apep, the dark Lord of Chaos, defeated? We seek to find a larger pattern, evidence that our lives are patterned on a higher dimension, an immortal and eternal realm to which we may return.
In fact, an entire concept of this came through during early common era Gnosticism, regarding the necessary passwords one would need when making this return journey, the soul no longer needing the boat ferry. Gatekeepers and Passwords
According to ancient history regarding these people, passed down to us as mythology, a mix of fact and fiction, the original Cretans or "Curetes" were Argonauts (Sailors of the Argo). They were the Minyae, the five immortal Curetes also called Dactyls, collectively Dactyloi, meaning fingers, who established the Minoan civilization. Exactly five "Dactyl/Glove" pictographs appear on the Phaistos Disk perhaps representing these five immortal Curetes or Cretans. Perhaps the rope truss tattoo symbolizes the sailor's lineage as descendant of the Argonauts and one of the five original Curetes/Dactyloi. Beside the "Glove" appears to be the "Golden Fleece" pictograph (above, 4), eternally sought for by the Argonauts sailing the night skies in the Argo. The fleece belonged to the golden haired ram (5), possibly the pictograph for Aries on the Phaistos Disk. Aries was anciently associated with the sun god Ra.
How did Cretans and Egyptians communicate? Did the Minoans speak Egyptian? Did the Egyptians speak Minoan? Is this picture writing found on the Phaistos Disk part of a specific nautical language used exclusively by the Minoans and the Egyptians in their communications? This might explain why it is found nowhere else and why it was not preserved by the Egyptians, who had their own written language.
The solve the maze puzzle, overlap the two sides to reveal the round maze. The overlap solution results in the display of another puzzle. If the Phaistos Disk is the Disk of the World, why is it shaped like a figure 8?
Bronze Age geometry theology involving Containment of Geometrical Arrangements may have passed from Minoan Crete into modern mysticism as the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, which could begin to explain why the known universe would be shaped as a figure 8. This geometry theology and number philosophy eventually became known as Sacred Geometry.
The pentagram-heptagram-heptagon geometry on the Phaistos Disk demonstrates a knowledge of the Emerald Table, or whatever they called it then. 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. Where before 10 spirals were visible, 5 each side, now they have become 8 with the overlap, the number of the Ogdoad where reside the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris and now proved to exist by the mathematics on the Disk.
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. I think the Phaistos Disk also proves the existence of Minoan astronomers, who speculated (see the Phaistos Disk Heliocentric Solar System on Page 4) that Earth is a planet and that the planets revolve around the sun "on the circumference of a circle," (Archimedes of Syracuse) and remain in their orbit because they are connected to each other, not by the force of gravity, of which they knew nothing, but by the force of geometry, of which, apparently, they were masters.
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." 
The rope truss was a unique nautical technology advancement of the Bronze Age, used to stiffen the beam of the ship (above at the base of the beam in the shape of a figure 8). No other such use of the truss is known until the days of modern engineering. Does this pictograph (below, left, 1) show a sailor with a rope truss tattoo on his cheek or is that a clue to the solution of the puzzle of the disk? Perhaps it is both. Beside him are pictographs that could be his oar (2) and his glove (3) for rowing. 
The Argos of mythology was built at Dodona, where an ancient sanctuary of Zeus was located. A stadium was built there in the 3rd century B.C., open like a sunflower to hold 18,000 people. (far left and "flower" from disk) Dodona also had several temples, a theater, a stadium, and an acropolis, including a Temple of Heracles. Was Dodona the site of the first Olympic Games?
Dodona was the oldest oracle, sacred to Zeus and Dione. An old oak tree there became an oracle when a black dove, from Egyptian Thebes, settled on it. Priestesses interpreted the rustling of the tree's leaves, the cooing of doves, and the clanging of brass vessels that were hung from the tree's branches. At Dodona, they spoke in images - symbols - not words. Does the Phaistos Disk preserve part of their symbol language?
Also in Dodona were the Oreiades, (right) divine children of the Dactyloi and cousins of the dancing Curetes. They were nymphs of the mountain oaks (1) and pines. They were usually portrayed with serpents (2), and they carried thyrsoi, pine-cone tipped staves or poles. (3) Thyrsoi were "symbolic wands, generally cane-like or knotted like a bamboo, and sometimes wreathed with ivy or vine leaves, with a pine-cone at the top." (Plutarch) 
The Argos (1) was made of sacred oak (2) from the oracle at Dodona. The Argonauts were sailing the Aegean Sea (3) searching for the golden fleece (4) belonging to the ram (5) that had been sacrificed to Zeus. 
Herakles and his brothers, the five original Curetes, are said to have built the alter of Olympic Zeus (1) and to have begun the Olympic games with a foot race, (2) which Herakles won. He received as his prize a branch of the wild olive. (3) 
"...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)
This is perhaps the original idea regarding the layered architecture of the celestial realms involving three important layers, as elucated 2,000 years later by Early Common Era Gnosticism. They are the Hebdomad (7), the Ogdoad (8), and the Ennead (9). On the Phaistos Disk is the theory regarding the layered architecture of the Ogdoad, the eighth sphere or aeon, and its continuum concept. Perhaps this is where our symbol for infinity originally comes from. Turned on its side it becomes the modern symbol for infinity or endlessness. The Ogdoad is marked by the brightest star in the sky, Sirius (brightest because of its proximity to our solar system). In Minoan mythology Sirius is the Minoan creation goddess Rhea (Chaos). In the invisible dimension where the lives, both above and on the Phaistos Disk, she is center the universe/Disk and surrounded by the planets revolving around her. 
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 Dionysus. Perhaps the disk was as famous then as it is now. In fact, there is a good 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 the Phaistos Disk is still considered to be undeciphered because scholars approach it from the standpoint of what they want it to be rather than allowing it to be whatever it is, which was my approach. As I had no paycheck on the line as regards my thinking about it, I could give it the latitude it deserves. But academia, and particularly linguists, want it to be like hieroglyphics but, as Sir Arthur Evans said nearly 100 years ago, etched into the clay are pictographs or picture writing. 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.
"The same development from the simple pictographic to the hieroglyphic or quasi-alphabetic stage might naturally have been expected to have taken place in more than one European area had it not been cut short by the invasion of the fully equipped Phoenician system of writing...Even as it is however, it must be allowed that there are strong a priori reasons for believing that in the Greek lands where civilization put forth its earliest blossoms on European soil, some such parallel evolution in the art of writing must have been in the course of working itself out." (Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phonecian Script Arthur J. Evans, M.A., F.S.A.)
Is the Phaistos Disk actually the legendary Maze of Daedalus, and we just don't realize it?
The Phaistos Disk, located 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.
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 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 the Minoan inventor Daedalus,
the world's greatest inventor, then it could be possible the Minoan Phaistos Disk was his most famous invention - the Maze of Daedalus - from which his legend grew.
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.