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What does the image on the disc represent?

Asked 26 Oct 2026 by ·4 answers·0·0 following
Most likely: the disc shows the night sky with the Pleiades and served as a memory aid and leap rule for reconciling lunar…Ahead on the evidence, not yet confirmed. It needs two reviews to be accepted.

Where it stands

Four answers have been proposed. The disc is a cosmological or shamanistic image of sun or moon and stars that does not map a real sky or… leads, with evidence 1 for: partly supported by its tests. Three are still possible.

Why it matters

The disc is called the oldest concrete depiction of the sky; whether it encodes astronomical knowledge, such as a leap rule, or is a symbolic cosmology changes what it says about Bronze Age Europe⁠[1]⁠[2].

Answers 4

Evidence: 1 for
Most likely
Evidence: 2 for
Most likely
None of these.
Not tested enough to call either way
Evidence: none yet
Still possible
Evidence: 1 against
Disputed

History

  1. Pásztor & Roslund puts forward: the disc is a cosmological or shamanistic image of sun or moon and stars that does not map a real sky or…
  2. Pásztor & Roslund: apart from the seven-star cluster the stars are scattered evenly; Pásztor and Roslund hold that they do not…For: The disc is a cosmological or shamanistic image of sun or moon and stars that does not map a real sky or…
  3. Pernicka et al. puts forward: the disc shows the night sky with the Pleiades and served as a memory aid and leap rule for reconciling lunar…
  4. Pernicka et al.: the seven-star cluster is clearly separated from the evenly distributed other stars.For: The disc shows the night sky with the Pleiades and served as a memory aid and leap rule for reconciling lunar…
  5. Vogt & Crocco puts forward: the image records a rare sky event, a planetary conjunction with Castor and Pollux in 2210 BC and a supernova.
  6. Vogt & Crocco: the proposal fits the disc to a computed conjunction and a candidate remnant (3C 58), but the disc was made…Against: The image records a rare sky event, a planetary conjunction with Castor and Pollux in 2210 BC and a supernova.
  7. Asked on this site
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