I like the theory that it's an examination piece to qualify as a master metalworker. Casting a flawless dodecahedron could have been a way to demonstrate your skill. The shape is somewhat arbitrary: anything that's both difficult to cast and easy to examine for quality would work, but once people started making dodecahedrons that's what people expected and it became a kind of standard.
The equivalent today would be 3Dbenchy boats -- "we found an identical boat toy design in multiple sites made of different plastic materials, colors and sizes. It is spread universally around the World cities, found in sites of crafts, leading us to believe it is an idol of a new 21st century religion predominant among workers of the arts and crafts"
Is this the one where they find the toilet seat and think it's jewelry or something? If so, had the same experience. I was too young to understand it and thought it was something scary.
"Yes yes the dodecahedron was considered a 'perfect' shape so this clearly represents a 'perfect' uterus surrounded by many ovaries, signifying overwhelming fertility." :P
“Also —and this didn’t make sense to us either— it doesn’t float, and there’s no engine. Our best guess is that it’s meant as a comment on the fulity of life.”
I like that theory too and offer a followon explanation: to make a dodecahedron you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods, you need to have learned a thing or two to get there. This makes it a better test than, say, an icosahedron. But we do know that the Roman empire wasn't completely unfamiliar with icosahedral dice, probably for a magical or divinatory purpose rather than determining whether your wizard made her saving throw.
An analogy to this "masterpiece" theory might be the industrial-age "Turner's cube" that demonstrates a pretty solid level of ability with a lathe.
I think the current view of many scholars is that the Roman D20s were for gaming use as well, if not primarily for gaming use. I would love to see the most recent scholarship on this, though. I assume the actual game is somewhat lost to time: game rules don't generally get written down in any medium that is durable enough to survive thousands of years.
That's interesting, I thought the case made for oracular use when I read about it was reasonable, but I may be a bit put of date. There was a fair bit of weird belief washing around in later Roman times before Christianity won out, though.
As for game rules - we have a tiny enough fraction of all non-elite-literary writing from antiquity that we probably wouldn't have a complete game's rules if they had been in the habit of writing them down - but we have so many surviving bits of writing that we ought to have fragments of rules. They seem rather thin on the ground, which leads me to suspect that written rules just didn't seem that important to most Romans. From Vindolanda to Oxyrhynchus they wrote bills and doggerel and love-life complaints and demands for new socks... but nothing at all that attempts to explain THAC0.
We don't even really know how they played Ludus Latrunculorum, despite finding quite a few sets and more boards - but there are several reconstructions from literary references. One of them I find quite engaging, so I hope it's on the right track.
To add onto this, the dodecahedron was considered a mystical object, the encapsulation of the highest conceivable realm, that of the etheric or eternal. [1]
Board games are much older than the Romans, though possibly not older than writing - and texts give us a bit of a clue that some early ones were part recreation part ceremonial. By Roman times pure recreational games were common and reasonably often referenced in their literature. They definitely used cubic dice with numbers on for games (and gambling). The icosahedral dice usually have Greek letters rather than numbers (occasionally symbols IIRC) which make them hard to move a piece to or compare scores; we don't seem to find them with game boards like we do "Latrunculi" counters; there's no textual support for a game with them (weak evidence, true) but there's a fair bit for strong interest in divination and oracles that could use them. So not a dead cert, but fairly likely for the D20s. Whereas when you find a Roman D6, you can be pretty sure it's for gaming and/or betting (or a thief's hit points).
Making a triangle or square or even hexagon with rule and compass is fairly easy. Making a really regular pentagon also only needs rule and compass, but noticeably more knowledge with them. Try it.
One thing to keep in mind is the geographic distribution of these things. They're mostly found in the province of Gallia and Britain, and not in other regions. There'd be a lot of metalworkers in Rome and the surrounding cities in central and south Italy, but no artifacts like this have been found, and they've found > 100 of them now so the distribution is probably significant.
Also: the size of the tube in French knitting isn't controlled by the size of the hole, it's controlled by the spacing of the pegs. You have to pass the wool over the pegs, so logically the pegs should be cylindrical not round. Earliest evidence for French knitting is 1535. There's no evidence for knitting of any kind until centuries after these things.
I'm going with prentice piece, based on the lack of wear. You hang a diploma on the wall, you put a prentice piece on a shelf for 30 years and barely touch it. (Although the gold examples would argue against this, I think).
I don't know if you've ever done French knitting or not, but you need to use a tool to lever the wool over the pegs. Something like a crochet hook. Traceology is the term sometimes used by archaeologists for examining this kind of wear, and they're pretty good at it - Aaron Deter-Wolf[1], for example, studies needles to determine if they were used for sewing or for tattooing.
Weaving, yes, and nålebinding is ancient (6500 BCE) but for some reason knitting doesn't seem to turn up until 10th century Egypt. Fabrics do get preserved sometimes, and knitting, like nålebinding, has the advantage of being portable. You'd think, if the technique was discovered significantly earlier, there'd be something to show it. A pair of knitting needles in a tomb somewhere, at least. After all the floors of iron age round houses seem to be littered with loom weights[2], and needles are also common finds. So where are the knitting needles?
For me, it's the gold examples that put the fly in the ointment of every theory (including my favourite). One imagines a Neopythagorean cult or something, but then you'd expect the geographic distribution to be different.
I don't really buy that theory. There's no explanation for why it needs to be this very-hard-to-cast bronze dodecahedron, instead of just a wooden board with pegs and holes, which is all that would be needed for the video above.
I’ve seen many vases and other such vessels in the homes of rich people that are not used to store liquids, but instead sit there empty on a console table in the hallway!
In that case this isn't a tool, it's a decoration. And if none of them are worn, then the decoration isn't imitating a knitting tool, since some would show wear if that were its actual use.
Anecdotally, I have seen decorative plates hanging on walls, spinning wheels, ships wheels, oil lamps, etc all used decoratively in contemporary settings.
I think you and the poster are in agreement. The significance is that you wouldn't need knitted gloves in Mediterranean climates. So if this was for some other use or as a novelty, you'd expect it evenly distributed throughout the empire
Why none in Roman North Africa or all the other provinces in the east which were also "the middle of nowhere" with the same needs of metal work as Gallia/Britain.
Roman North Africa was thoroughly Romanized by the era these start showing up, and the eastern provinces were as well. The might be some cultural reason these show up where they do, seems likely, it's very, very dubious that this cultural reason had to do with metalworkers identifying themselves since the sort of Roman metal working technology and culture around it was actually very standardized across the empire at this time.
Well, the regions the dodecahedrons have been found were mostly not thoroughly Romanised, right? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron: "at least 116 similar objects have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom".
No, that's not right at all. Those areas were all part of the Roman empire and thoroughly Romanized as well. They used generally identical Roman technologies in Britain as North Africa or Italy, spoke the same Latin, used the same building styles, clothing styles varied primarily by how many layers they wore, they had the same legal system, and shared Roman arts and culture.
Man of those countries speak Germanic languages now since they were invaded by Germanic speaking people after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, but there's still Roman ruins and old Roman cities to be found in all of those countries.
Actually have they collapsed ? The Germanic king actually follow Roman rule practices. Strange argument I knew. Especially after the famous history of the fall of the Roman Empire.
I don't think they would, geographic frequency actually does make the knitting tool idea more compelling, though none of the dodecahedra show any sign of wear from use which makes the knitting tool hypothesis sound unlikely - if the dodecahedra was a tool it wasn't used frequently at all. I don't think any hypothesis is all that compelling, they are very much a mystery.
We have very few accounts or records surviving in general (and basically none at all from certain periods). There are a few books about agriculture, architecture, medicine etc. surviving but thats it. Basically all non political/military/religious/cultural texts had been lost
Going from Rome to Lyon was about two weeks of travel. Paris and London about a month. Possibly (much) longer depending on season and how much funds you had.
You can imagine how often the average metalworker from Rome visited these places.
As someone from the former capital of Raetia ;-) I might add "Since then, at least 116 similar objects have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom"
PS: Still humbled and amazed to find my small hometown of Cambodunum (70k people) on maps of major Roman roads like
That just doesn't work for me for two reasons, they would have been recycled almost immediately as all metals were relatively precious, and why don't we find as many other training pieces?
And of course it goes without saying that they've appeared made out of non-metal materials.
They wouldn't be recycled if they were also used as a credential for quality of work. If you're a metal worker who wants to migrate to a new town, and wants to work at my forge, how do I know you can do quality work? Sure, these could be stolen but I'm assuming a master metal worker knows the right questions to ask to verify it's legitimate.
You're right that the master metal worker should be able to sniff out a fraud, but then what role does the dodecahedron play? It would be like me applying to a programming job by showing up with a ZIP file of some code I'd written in the past, which of course I promise I didn't steal from a better programmer. You'd probably give it very little credence compared to either personal references or work done in front of you.
If your dodecahedron were essentially your “resume”, you’d go out of your way to keep it safe from thieves. Besides, stealing one wouldn’t do you much good, as you’d be discovered as a fraud pretty quickly based on the quality of your work.
Having one of these in your possession would be enough to get you in the door, as well as giving your potential employer a quick and easy way to judge the quality of your work. The alternative would be to require a prospective employee to make a dodecahedron in front of you, which doesn’t really provide all that much of a benefit in the long term.
I don't see anything about the dodecahedrons being signed or stamped or branded in any way, so I can't buy them being a resume. Seems like if it were your personal proof of employability, and you cared a lot about it not being stolen, the first thing you'd put some mark on it to indicate it was yours. And then there's the fact that some of them have been found buried in coin hoards, which doesn't make sense (why would you collect a craftsman's portfolio piece and store it with your treasure?).
I don't think ancient roman society worked that way. Traveling is expensive first of all, carrying stuff if even more expensive. You carry what you need, not metal trinkets.
And also your reputation is based mostly on word of mouth. That's how it still works in rural societies today.
If there were any such certification for metalurgists it would have been a small one like a ring or a bracelet.
Ancient Roman society was not Medieval Europe, there was very little serfdom, especially among those with any skill whatsoever, so plenty of people moved from place to place, likely dozens or hundreds of times in their lives.
There were plenty of captured slaves from conquered peoples, but skilled metalworkers would hardly belong to that group.
The vast majority of people would never have willingly traveled far from their birthplace, in medieval Europe or the Roman Empire. This is especially true for those who had few skills. You could do basic labor in your own village, but how could you leave without any money or support network (e.g., a family)? Why would people trust you elsewhere? The dynamic was probably different in larger cities, of which there were more in Roman times compared to the (at least early) medieval period though.
This had little to do with serfdom, and practices that would fit under what we might call serfdom were extremely varied from time and place. It would have been very rare for someone to have the means, ability, and desire to move far from their home yet couldn't because they were somehow legally bound to land owned by a lord (who only had power over that one area anyhow).
The speculation is that there were created by advanced apprentices. What we’d now call “journeymen.” Most people didn’t move around maybe, but I wouldn’t be that surprised to find that they did.
They absolutely would have moved around since one of the most common ways to get the apprenticeships was to sign up to help with an army that was mobilizing for war. Militaries needed a lot of blacksmiths to tag along as support and they needed a lot of apprentices for manual labor. When they came back from, they often had a little more choice in where to go back to so they had quite a bit more mobility over all.
Not just that, but "head out with the military, stay where you end up (or somewhere along the route)" is a tried-and-true method of moving people throughout history. How else would you end up with Latin dialects spoken over a range from Portugal to the Black Sea?
People travelled, but regular people didn't routinely travel to the other side of the empire. The road network was probably used more for "local travel" than "far travel".
Sure, but for the vast majority of workers and artisans they would most likely do a pilgrimage. And we have found tons of little charms, even penises, but they are all much smaller than any of the dodecahedrons.
Travel with luggage is what I was referring to as rare for most people.
During roman period most likely people traveled for festivals.
Archaeologists have found what could be temporarily built up areas for festivals. And it is known that festivals were a big thing that gave the population a break from work.
Which is what I personally would like to connect with the famous penis pendants, but nobody knows for sure. They could just be fertility symbols related to courtship and marriage.
FYI I'm doing a lot of guessing here, which is apt when it comes to discussing dodecahedrons. In my opinion you can look at contemporary, or near contemporary, rural communities and see a lot of similarities with ancient society.
The roads were mainly for the army though. And water travel was almost always preferable when traveling long distances (the cost of shipping for goods was a magnitude or more lower).
Serfdom (or a comparable system) and other strong legal limitations on social mobility were certainly a thing in the 300s.
> so plenty of people moved from place to place, likely dozens or hundreds of times in their lives.
I’m not sure how is it particularly different from medieval Europe in that way?
But there are other reasons why traveling and moving to different regions was relatively rare for most people (e.g. almost everyone was extremely reliant on their local social networks, so moving to a different community was very costly). Of course metalworkers and other highly skilled craftsmen were probably always one of the most mobile groups (in pre-Roman times and during the middle ages as well)
They're small enough that I can imagine people holding onto them. The hollow construction also reduces the quantity of metal used. And it's possible that we find other training pieces but don't recognize them as such, because the other ones could have practical uses.
Lots of artifacts have survived that were made of metal that didn’t get recycled and didn’t serve a practical purpose. After coinage, the most common metal artifacts from that time period are simple pendants and jewelry. Most of them made from iron and bronze rather than precious metals.
Yes and no. I respect the "they would have been recycled" argument, but, there would still be some. If you were good enough to cast a Dodecahedron, you are probably rich enough to keep your best one, to show off to all the new hipster kids.
Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle. So the amount of these dodecahedrons indicate that there were a lot more in circulation at the time.
2000 years of poor and homeless people looking for any metal they can sell as scrap.
That's why I don't buy the apprentice argument that always pops up in these discussions.
In this case you'd be excused for saying it's some sort of ritualistic object. Because rituals are important in people's lives, important enough to create and carry around metal and stone objects with you. And rituals pervade all of society.
I don't claim to know what it is, but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.
That's not really true. There's regular finds of hoards of thousands of ancient coins that are in excellent condition, esp. Roman coins. You'll find there's an actually quite a large number of ancient metal artifacts archaeologists have discovered if you look into it. Certainly the preservation rate is very low since people tend to guard metal objects and recycle them, but things happen, today archaeologists estimate there's something in the order of 10-30 millions of Roman coins that have been recovered in museum collections and held by private owners.
This depends on the metal, of course, iron preserves poorly as does bronze, so those are rare, but gold preserves extremely well, and silver better than bronze, esp. in drier conditions.
Yes. Humans really liked burying things. Burying prized or expensive objects was pretty normal in human history. Layers of dirt only piled on with time. I don't think humans did much Archaeology pre-19th century. There are buckets of ancient coins. I leave this evidence of old metal laying around: "The Horses of Saint Mark, also known as Triumphal Quadriga, 2nd or 3rd century CE, via Basilica di San Marco, Venice"
But the very fact that people buried them proves how sought after they were.
And of course if something is buried, and everyone involved dies before retrieving it, then it survives. But a lot of circumstances have to line up for that to happen.
They were very sought after, but it was very common for folks to put their money in a sealed ceramic pot to protect and hide it, either buried under the floor of their home somewhere or outside in some secret spot. There were regular wars, plagues, invasions, and other civic chaos that left many of these hidden troves long buried until someone later found them. Ancient peoples buried a lot of metal artifacts for burials or rituals (the Celts buried a lot of weapons in their rites) that have been recovered as well. Lots of circumstances need to line up, but the ancient past had many very chaotic eras. With metal detectors large numbers of troves are being rediscovered.
We’re talking about tiny pieces of copper, though. Would it really have been that expensive to be worth the trouble (unless you had a bag of them)
> but I think it was either very important to some ritual, or very practical to some trade.
Why? We know that premodern people often spent significant amounts of money/resources on things that were neither practical nor had any religious importance
That theory works for me. Making a wooden hammer is a typical first project for the hand-tool woodworker — so perhaps the metal smith had a similar hello world.
My first thought was that the thing was some kind of "hub" for ropes used perhaps in some tent design. I was imagining rope loops passing through the holes and then looped over a stud on the other side. But the article says there are no signs of wear and so not a tool.
That wouldn’t really explain why the holes have different sizes on different sides, and why some of the dodecahedrons were found in wealthy women’s graves.
That was my immediate thought when I first saw the article about these. The whole 'it was probably something religious' is such a cop out and I can't believe scientists continue to push that anytime they can't explain something.
I’m not sure why there’s always so much focus on purpose. People build objects of geometric fascination as art objects all the time. I agree with you that there need not be any religious significance here.
>why does it always have to be a religious object if an object doesn't have a clear and distinct purpose attached to it.
Worth looking at how the Romans themselves thought. They were incredibly superstitious, overbearingly and obsessively religious (this is Roman Catholicism's roots), they believed in magic and spirits, constantly consulted oracles, augury, and other signs to make important decisions, and key roles in the Roman government was run by people who were also priests, in the Republic and early Empire most civic functions were also religious, and after Caesar they regularly deified their leaders.
Given that this object was clearly precious to its owners (found in treasure hoards/graves), wasn't used as a tool where it would receive any wear, and no one discussed it at all, a cult object would make a great deal of sense. Perhaps Gallic Rome had a regional cult these are tied to. There's a massive number of other Roman ritual objects, magic tablet, amulets, curse tablets, and other religious ephemera, the Romans really loved their cults and rites, if you have an unknown Roman object that's conspicuously not spoken about like these things, that itself is a fair reason to suspect the object might be used in secret religious/cult rites.
But haven't these things been found all over the world? Like as far as Vietnam. We've found hundreds of them.
"Its a cool object" doesn't quite explain its ubiquity, or the fact that they are almost identical looking despite which side of the globe their on. That suggests purpose to me.
Wheels and balls have also been found across the world.
Dodecahedrons are fundamental shapes. Thus universal. And also expected size would be pretty much same. In general symmetry is pleasant. So I would expect symmetric shapes to come up when people have enough time and resources to build them, even if they have no use.
Dodecahedrons with nobs on the vertices aren't really fundamental shapes. As far as I'm aware there have been zero found without the nobs on, and hundreds found with the nobs.
Agree, why does it always have to be a religious object if an object doesn't have a clear and distinct purpose attached to it.
I guess when future archeologist dig up our junk they'd believe we were an extremely religious society, with many superstitions and strange beliefs. /s
They’ve got a lot of sentimental value to the original owners of those hoards. It actually makes more sense: master blacksmiths were far more likely to be wealthy enough to have coin hoards and considered the objects symbolic of the trade that made that wealth.
It's the archaeologists saying, “Nobody knows for certain how the Romans used them,” and offering a variety of competing theories, while people on this thread are trying to finesse the facts to support the theory they like.
So saying, "archaeologists are doing it" is demonstrably untrue here.
There are plenty of academic papers written by historians and archaeologists speculating about Roman dodecahedrons. That's where most of these ideas are coming from.
You just won't find them in HN comments for obvious reasons.
I didn't say they are merely speculating; that's a pretty normal thing to do. I said they are "latching on to this theory and making speculations to support it." In other words, they are starting with the conclusion, and making guesses to support that conclusion.
You incorrectly stated that's a tradition in archaeology, as if that would make any difference. It's not how theories are meant to be formed from evidence, regardless of whether or not you think it's a tradition in archaeology (which it isn't.)
The original commenter was explicit that they liked the theory, not that they were willing to make things up to support it. Those are two completely different things.
it could be coincidence, since people with metal detectors looking for coins find them. there could perhaps be more, but not where coin searching with metal detectors is common?
