When the ancient Hermeticists, or whatever they called themselves, of the Minoan Crete and the late Pharaonic Egypt world looked into the Mediterranean Bronze Age skies at night, they believed they saw more than just stars and planets. They believed they saw the Absolute - that which is unchanging and eternal. Acknowledging its ubiquitous nature, they looked for it in other parts of their world and found it in math, geometry, astronomy, and the Great Pyramid.
If not for the Phaistos Disk, excavated in 1908, we would have no way to excavate their scientific accomplishments or their beliefs about the universe. The 3,600-year-old Phaistos Disk is the most famous undeciphered artifact in archaeology, and likely to remain so as this solution presented here will find no more acceptance than Hermeticism in the groves of academe or in the gen pop, either. Ah, Aten! As it once was, so it still is.
This is an artifact of antique Hermeticism that was created more than 3,200 years before that brand of intellectual pursuit finally broke through its social oppression to acquire that name.
At nearly 6" diameter it is only a little larger a DVD and packed just as tight with content about a lost civilization, but is more technologically advanced in that it has a matching second side full of additional information. All that is needed to gain access to the lost world is the key.
A 1200-year-gap, perhaps more, exists between when the Disk was created and when the ancient Greeks began to document the development of the sciences preserved by the Disk that would eventually be called Hermeticism, in another 2,000 years after that in the 17th century CE. The artifact preserves the blending of Minoan and Egyptian influences involving the very beginning of this serious scientific thought about the universe and about the approach of gaining spiritual knowledge - Gnosis - from a scientific orientation.
Ultimately, the Disk is a preservation of a Mediterranean Bronze Age math argument that the universe is a math structure, in fact a math maze, comprehensible through the integrated sciences of mathematics, geometry, and astronomy.
Only the Hermeticists, of which there were many and likely a cult, pursued this intellectual inquiry, as the general population was focused differently, their beliefs forming the basis of Greek mythology, in a parallel development. The Hermeticist and their studies informed the technology of that age, as they also were scholars, artisans, architects, inventors, merchants and, in this particular instance, pottery artists.
Observe the Phaistos Disk, a terra cotta pottery masterpiece and the most famous of the art creations to come from the Minoan Crete world. Imagine it is the night sky and you are looking up into it. There at the center is the fixed North Star, unmoving while the entirety of the cosmos circles around in a spiral. Note the locations of the etched pictographs. Like the stars, they too are unchanging, their positions absolute.
Locate the 15 matching pictographs of a circle containing the points of a hexagram. Beside most of them is a Warrior pictograph, encouraging the idea that the hexagram circle pictograph is a Shield. In one instance, a Warrior is holding a Shield. The instruction seems to be to consider the Shields as points and connect them with lines, as in plane geometry and as in the Minoan way of creating our 48 original constellations.
On following that instruction, suddenly revealed is that North Star with the cosmos moving around it. Surrounded by 7 Shields on the outside spiral, the configuration, in terms of plane geometry, is a pentagram surrounded by a heptagram, or in math is, 5 (pentagram), 6 (hexagram), and 7 (heptagram), and in terms of the sacred geometers of the modern age it is the revered "pent-hept."
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 oppress the enlightened perspective that Earth is not the center of the universe for, if it is not, their power as God's representatives on Earth is in jeopardy, as well as their tithes.
But 1000 years before that, heliocentrism was regarded as a radical theory and apparently repressed 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 oppression of this enlightened idea, Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 - c.212 BCE) writes to King Gelon, regarding Aristarchus' theory but, 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."
1,300 years before Archimedes' letter to King Gelon, Minoan astronomers appear to have 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. With the ancient science of geometry had been built the greatest of all structures at least 1,600 years before the Phaistos Disk was created - the Great Pyramid. For all they knew, it had been there forever.
The geometry force connecting the planets to each other is a heptagon, because the math involved is 7. Further, the geometric configurations above allow for the possibility Minoan astronomers theorized that the stars, different from the planets in that they are fixed, are the same type of heavenly body as the sun.
Preserved on the Phaistos Disk is a treatise etched in clay, using pictographs and spirals, 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.
The revelations of the Phaistos Disk continue...
This large, hidden pictograph also represents, in an astronomical syncretism, the blue star Sirius, the heliacal rising of which was their method of timekeeping. The star is surrounded by 7 known "planets" of their world, historically recorded to be Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But here (below), the Sun appears in the center, where Sirius rises with it (heliacal rising) at the beginning of each new year, and on the outside spiral, with its 12 line segments, are the planets: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all revolving around the Sun. 
