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! 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Preserved on the Phaistos Disk, using pictographs and spirals etched in clay, is a treatise about how geometry, mathematics, and astronomy - the integrated sciences of the Minoan world and the sacred sciences of the first Hermeticists - were used to propose the first recorded heliocentric theory of the solar system/universe and the first recorded theory that the sun is a star.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473 - 1543 CE) is credited with the discovery that planets revolve around the sun. For maintaining the heretical Corpernican heliocentrism, Galileo (1564 - 1642 CE) was condemned, threatened with torture, and placed under house arrest by the Catholic Church in its failed attempt to suppress the ancient enlightened perspective that Earth is not the center of the universe.
But 1000 years before that, heliocentrism was regarded as a radical theory and apparently suppressed by astronomers through the ages who could see no value in supporting it, if they had ever heard of it. The Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c.310 - c.230 BCE) proposed such a theory, believed to be based upon a theory by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 - 385 BCE), Greek Pythagorean, regarding a fire at the center of the universe which Aristarchus believed to be the sun.
In a temporary breakthrough in the continuous social suppression of this enlightened idea, Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 - c.212 BCE) writes to King Gelon regarding Aristarchus' theory. Though King Gelon is made aware it, the theory of heliocentrism becomes occulted again for 1000 years:
"You are now aware that the "universe" is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface." (Archimedes)
That description, on diagram, would look like this:
It appears that 1,300 years before Archimedes' letter to King Gelon, Minoan astronomers speculated that Earth is a planet and that the planets revolve around the sun "on the circumference of a circle," and remain in their orbit because they are connected to each other. Theorized on the Phaistos Disk is that the connection is not the force of gravity, of which they knew nothing, but is the force of geometry, of which they were masters. The ancient science of geometry had built the Great Pyramid, the greatest of all structures, at least 1,600 years before the Phaistos Disk was created. For all anyone knew, it had been there forever.
The Minoans may have included the symbols for the constellations in much of their art and not just on the Phaistos Disk. Is this just an impossibly huge dog on a bead-seal (above) or could it represent the "Great Dog constellation," Canis Major and the "dog star" Sirius? (left, Minoan Cylinder Seal
The circle above the great dog could read "star" and the figure 8 symbol to the left, two stars combined, could read "star group" or constellation, in this case Great Dog, Canis Major, with the largest star in the sky, Sirius.
The figure 8 might therefore be a pictograph for constellation, logically so because the stars are infinite, and we might also use it as a clue to the solution of the Phaistos Disk maze puzzle.
If it is a sign for constellation, this would make the maze puzzle solution even more a-mazing! The solution would be their symbol for constellation and a validation that many of the geometries contained by the Phaistos Disk are indeed constellations. It would mean the two sides of the Phaistos Disk, individually, represent "star," and connected together they represent "star group" or constellation. So, the Phaistos Disk would have been an attempt to preserve all the constellations the Minoans had identified, a subject and effort worthy of a pottery art masterpiece, I think :) (Phaistos Disk left, pictographs removed)
The Bull's Foot appears twice on the disk, both times on side one and each time with a Walker. (left) The Bull's Foot appears upside-down in relation to the Walker, so perhaps the indication is the Bull's Foot is above or in the sky. Perhaps this two-pictograph combination also implies Serapis, the sacred Osiris-Apis bull worshipped in Egypt.
Connect these matching Walker pictographs with lines to draw the Taurus constellation.
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