The Phaistos Disc (Middle Bronze Age Crete, c. 1800–1600 BCE) remains undeciphered despite more than a century of scholarly investigation. All previous proposals have treated it as encoding language or narrative. This paper proposes an alternative hypothesis for consideration by specialists: that the disc may function as a spatial market directory rather than a linguistic text — a fired clay map of the commercial redistribution complex at the Minoan palace of Phaistos. The disc bears 241 stamped symbols from 45 distinct signs arranged in 61 spiral groups. Under the proposed hypothesis, each group corresponds to a functional market space and each sign represents a commodity category. Thirteen independent quantitative tests were applied using published archaeological and epigraphic data; 11 produced results consistent with the hypothesis. The author is an independent researcher without archaeological or epigraphic training, and the analysis is offered as a pattern-recognition exercise that specialists may find worth testing, refining, or refuting.
Fraser Muir (2026) studied this question.