Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries
livescience.com
livescience.com
as everyone who’s played DnD knows.
> Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire.
Sounds like you might be right!
Oh my, I’m getting flashbacks to this absurd Meeple copyright (edit: trademark) case for some reason due to the arguments that were used. It’s a really weird case if you’re into copyright (edit: trademark) law, which if you’re here on HN to read this, I’ll take the odds that you might be. Something about discussing stuff that may or may not be dice made me primed for that perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeple#History
> Over 40 games with the word meeple in the title had been published as of 2024. Several games published by large game companies, like AEG and Asmodee, have even published games with the term in the titles, as well as adopting the token design commonly associated with the term, including such games as Mutant Meeples (2012), Terror in Meeple City (2013), the Meeple Circus series (2017-2021), and Meeples and Monsters (2022). This continued until 2019, when "MEEPLE" was registered as an EU trademark owned by Hans im Glück. The 2019 trademarking was objected to by, among others, gaming company CMON. The critics argued that the term has been used in common parlance, and the very shape of the meeple became commonplace in the industry. This resulted in the EU trademark exempting the category "toys and games"; however, Hans im Glück has since registered the term as a trademark in Germany for usage which does include toys and games, and the company also acquired the EU trademark for the shape of the ‘original’ meeple figure as used in Carcassonne. In 2024, the company Cogito Ergo Meeple received a cease and desist for unsanctioned use of the trademark, and decided to change the name of their upcoming game from Meeple Inc to Tabletop Inc, and the name of the company itself to Cotswold Games.
It goes on. I would try to shorten this but it’s just so silly that for it to make as little sense as it’s supposed to, I had to quote that much to be fair to the issue and how silly it is.
Do you know if this sort of nonsense is commonplace or is this a weird edge case?
Roll for initiative.
Historical evidence demonstrates that those short swords served Romans well.
A stay-at-home mom/pattern maker whose "eureka moment was visiting the Met in New York and seeing Roman jewelry with knitted chains" created a video confirming her theory was possible[0].
The glove theory is also good (and maybe the device was just multi-use?), as I seem to recall that the majority (all?) of these devices were found in colder/northern Roman settlements.
It seems the "wear pattern" on this example[1] from the UK matches what one might expect if you were to repeatedly wrap wire around the corner knobs.
With that said, its unclear that we'll ever know! (unless we find a grave with dodecahedrons and their products)
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADTLozKm0I
[1]https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1325774111601067&id=...
Of course, the end products would not have survived to our time.
This theory explains many things about the object:
- the dodecahedrons have been found all around Europe, but particularly in the north
- they are not in one standard size
- the hole sizings are a good match for fingers
- the same template can be used for both left and right hands, leaving one set of holes for some sort of stick to stand on
Gloves would have been very important clothing items in the northern parts of the empire, and in military use, they would have fallen apart quickly, necessitating their replacement from local sources.
Fingered leather gloves would have been prohibitively expensive if they were available at all, and fur gloves would not have been nimble enough for handling a sword and a shield, or for any other task requiring finger dexterity.
Since they would have been personal items, soldiers would have carried them wherever they were stationed, and kept them after their military careers. This would explain why they were also found in temperate and warm parts of the empire.
Solved? The Roman Dodecahedron [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40960287 - July 2024 (2 comments)
The Mysterious Roman Dodecahedron Was Possibly Just for Knitting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40959715 - July 2024 (0 comments)
The Enigma of the Roman Dodecahedron Is Revealed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40853737 - July 2024 (2 comments)
Roman Dodecahedron - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40829091 - June 2024 (1 comment)
'Great enigma': Amateur archaeologists unearth mysterious Roman object - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40205014 - April 2024 (1 comment)
Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102069 - Jan 2024 (381 comments)
The mysterious dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937540 - May 2023 (99 comments)
No one is certain what Roman bronze dodecahedrons were used for (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717215 - Dec 2021 (207 comments)
What were these Roman objects used for? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237271 - Nov 2020 (37 comments)
The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439351 - Nov 2019 (7 comments)
Paper was rolled into scrolls, and that's why you find them everywhere, because just like today people communicated with one another.
If you need to leave a message you write it on a scroll and insert in a hole. You could have different sized holes for different sized messages / documents.
You could basically leave the mailbox on your desk and have people put messages there for you to read (or the other way around)
The bits on the corners simply keep it a bit off of the surface - important incase of any moisture, spills etc.
And there are people on this planet with solid gold pens in their pocket. People today love flaunting their wealth, and so did people 2000 years ago.
False.
>Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old, perfectly preserved wooden toilet seat at a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.
believe fewer unevidenced claims
So the article you link says, in colloquial English terms, that stone and marble toilets from the period are pretty common but wooden toilet seats are basically all disintegrated. Only one (1) wooden seat is known to remain.
This just got me thinking, it would likely take us hours to explain an ancient Roman what a "paperweight" is. The fact that paper a) exists, b) is our main writing support, and c) can be made so lightweight that a slight breeze can blow a stack of it away would be mind-blowing
So the two sticks kept the scroll unwound around the reading position.
How parochial. My oldest brother came back with a block with a hole cut in it, with 4 nails, wanting to buy yarn. Soon me, and my two brothers were using all of our nervous energy cranking out red, blue and rainbow colored finger tubes by the dozen. We gave them to someone who knew how to crochet, and were given plastic blocks to knit the hands, each in our size, in a months time, we each had three pairs of warm gloves for the mornings. We gave the blocks to our younger cousins in Canada, and they cranked out enough gloves for classrooms of children.
So when I saw these devices, I knew exactly what they were for: 1. Making gloves. 2. Confusing people who never had used a knitting block, and 3. causing un-due speculation.
Why no wear on the nob necks? Soft wool. Our blocks used high carbon steel finishing nails, which never wore, but even brass, would at first polish, and then would patina over, leaving no marks.
Why no hooks? for finishing? Those would have been made of wood, and like other looms, would have disappeared. what they should be looking for is collections of brass nails.
"Wool was the most important fiber in the Roman world."
https://sites.google.com/view/dulciasromancloset/roman-texti...
1) They're not found with wear-marks, so they couldn't have been done for anything laborious like wire-weaving.
2) They've got no size markings and don't match each other, so they couldn't have been used for anything standardized. The holes of opposing sides don't have matching sizes.
3) Platonic solids have religious significance, so they may have been deliberately impractical (but if it's a tool where's the practical peasant version of it? Like a series of plates?)
4) They're found primarily in and around Rome's Celtic holdings, not Rome itself.
5) They're expensive so they're probably not just measuring grapes.
So the first question is, beyond cultural significance, why make them a platonic solid?
It guarantees the distance between the opposing sides is consistent, while allowing you to carry 6 different hole-pairs all with that same "distance" in a single object. But it can't be a measuring tool because of fact (2).
And if there's no good reason for it to be a platonic solid, why haven't they found any non-platonic-solid versions of them?
Maybe it's the gamer in me but I think it's some kind of gambling game based on the irregularity of coinage. Roll the thingamajig, drop in a coin that goes through the top but not the bottom. I mean it was found around military camps and caches of coins, right? Casino game.
Would be nice if there were a database of precise measurements of those discovered so far. The paper suggesting they may have been a dioptron[1] has a small sample data, but not enough to make any conclusions.
I was thinking same. At least if we knew the side-lengths and radii of the circles (particularly the opposing circles) we could see if there are any consistent ratios.
(2’,6); (10.5,17)
(So many modelers try to recreate the Millennium Falcon from scratch for example when, given their skills at modeling, I've never understood why they all just don't go off and come up with a creation of their own design. But it's kind of a Hello World for modeling perhaps?)
So of this was a tradition among craftsman, taught and shown off in person, nobody would have seen a need to write about it.
Whereas tax records were how the state ensured it got its money and citizens proved they had already paid - everyone wanted that written down.
Another is the rune 'Peorð'.[2] All the Anglo-Saxon runes have names in the Rune Poem, all the rest of which are known words in the corpus.But 'Peorð' isn't recorded anywhere else. No one knows what it means.
1.https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26482/mind-boggling-fact...
Mustard seems to be the agreed answer for the third condiment, though some people hold out for sugar instead. (Sugar seems to be unlikely because it wasn't cheap enough to be commonplace until after the third shaker fell out of use).
Most of our info is encoded digitally now. We put everything on some cloud server and that company gets shut down. Whoops. We change formats somewhere along the way and nobody converts old things over. Whoops. Documentation for implementing a decoder for that data was all stored online and maintained by one nerd who maintained the open source project all on their own. That will be arcane knowledge 5 years after they die. More so 50 years and 1000 years later.
And that's not even taking into account that data simply rots away over time, and things we don't actively copy over will be lost. Plus disasters like massive solar flares that could wipe everything. We've had a few solar flares that knocked out electricity before. We think that's about as bad as it gets, but the fact is, we don't know just how bad solar flares can be. We haven't had any way to measure them before fairly modern times and people didn't have any devices that would be affected by them.
If (when) Google dies, there's zero chance everything on Youtube gets backed up. There'll be a 2 week notice and then it's all gone. Only things with active fanbases will have data copied. And once people forget about that content, it'll also fade away with time.
A lot of people here will think, "Nah, no way. Someone will definitely save that stuff and it'll be fine." That's what our ancestors thought, too. "Someone will do it. Why worry? Who cares?"
But yeah why would they have ever gone to the south?
The problem is that one can poke similar holes in other proposals. Personally I favour the "proof of skill" explanation but there are also arguments against that.
Having said that, these dodecahedrons are complex enough, they would probably a journeyman level project at minimum.
Personally, I like the theory they are surveying/measuring instruments, probably coupled with enough mysticism and numerology that decorative versions were made to satisfy the non-professional market. think something like masonic emblems. Noting that the guilds for these sort of things were full of trade secrets and obscure rituals.
Great theory. But as you can see in the picture:
1. This thing is very carefully crafted.
2. The holes have different sizes.
I don't think this is by chance. There must be a reason for this and the explanation, be it coin counting, knitting or whatever, has to take this into account.
And none were found in Italy or in the South. Guess what, you don't need gloves there in the winter.
With so many different coin sizes and types in the empire, I think this makes most sense.
Wikipedia also mentions this:
> Several dodecahedra were found in coin hoards, suggesting either that their owners considered them valuable objects, or that their use was connected with coins — as, for example, for easily checking coins fit a certain diameter and were not clipped.
The cause behind this narrative hustle is the industrial historical arrogation which teaches that knitting was not invented until 1000 years after "The Romans". They had textiles, weaving, but no knitting.
This is early mere patent protection during the capitol rush of industrialism, claiming devices which were not actually invented as pretended, and therefor should have no claim to copyrights. The cotton gin was not invented in 1793.
Moreover it is a supremely ignorant and abstract notion, showing how detached academia is from reality. Anybody with time on their hands and some vines may invent weaving, knotting, knitting, and with metal slivers many ways to make pins. There has never been a people without this technology.
The short staple cotton gin was invented in 1793.
The thing about conspiracies is that there tends to be a purpose behind them. What would be the point of this one? That the cotton gin couldn't be patented? How would that possibly impact any single person today? What would be the incentive for continuing this conspiracy?
In general, historians are pretty quick to correct mistakes from their past interpretations of facts. So why would this be different?
The point however is not that of protecting copyright, but that copyright protection was invented to usurp technology which was not truly invented. This is how controlling history controls the present, for if all roads lead back to "we invented this and own it" then all roads forwards must pay that toll. If the narrative were not true, then the premise could not hold.
Another good suggestion was that it was used for knitting, there was a very cool video of this on YouTube somewhere.
And the last I like is it’s just a game.
I think it was one of the earliest multi-tools and all of these were what it was used for
I've started to see this object appear in various media, like sitting on a desk behind a professor, or in a studio of a Roman intellectual when time traveling to that era.
"Oh you're a Roman citizen you say? Can you prove it?"
"You know I can't prove it, you'll have to take my word for it" nonchalantly fidgets with their dodecahedron
"You know, I'll just take your word for it, be on you way" wink
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
> We have what looks to be a man, perhaps in middle age. A few things are notable. First, he wears a white toga (the standard formal Roman folded cloth garment, draped from the left shoulder) and a white tunic with a purple stripe (two, in fact, the other is concealed beneath the toga). When I show my students this picture, I joke that the man might as well have worn his, “I AM A ROMAN CITIZEN” t-shirt; the impact of the clothing here is similarly blunt. While a fellow might wear a toga in a variety of colors for fashion’s sake, this solid-white toga is the toga virilis: the distinctive formal dress of a Roman citizen. Meanwhile, that purple stripe on his tunic is the angustus clavus (or angusticlavius, literally ‘the narrow stripe’). That too was a bit of clothing reserved as a marker of status – whereas the toga virilis says “I am a Roman citizen” the angusticlavius says “I am of the equestrian order” (nothing to do directly with horses by this point, it merely indicates wealth and that the individual isn’t involved in politics in Rome). In short then, this man – or more correctly, his surviving family who commissioned the portrait – is telling us, in no uncertain terms, “I was a wealthy Roman citizen.” I want to stress that point: there was no real distinctive national appearance that indicated a Roman – no particularly Roman hair color or what have you – but there was a distinctive dress that indicated citizenship, which only citizens were entitled to wear and which was so important the Romans went so far as to call themselves the gens togata (‘the people of the toga’).
> of course that fact about clothing is really very handy for us if we want images from the provinces in color where we can know with a high degree of certainty that the subjects are Roman citizens, since anyone wearing either the toga virilis or a tunic with that clavus is declaring their citizenship (in a way that would get them in rather a lot of trouble if they were lying!)
This wasn't the space for subtlety; it was the space for strict formal legal controls. If the dodecahedrons were serving that purpose, we'd know about it.
So that’s my guess.
I understand skill was certainly required, but how were those made, exactly 2,000 years ago?
This seems completely obvious to me, but apparently its not?
If someone can find precise measurements of one of these I will bet that when you compute the distances for a reference object when sighted through different hole pairs it makes simple integer ratios.
The balls you mention are another interesting point — why they would even be there for a "range finder".
About three years ago. Every kid that exists in my area had to have a butterfly yoyo. Some convinced their parents to spend hundreds on trick yoyo's. That fad died after about 10 months, though.
That there are YouTube videos showing it being used to do exactly that does NOT mean that was its intended or original function.
In fact, all of the sources I consulted stated that your proposed function is one of approximately 50 possible and speculated uses but that there is still no conclusive evidence as to the device's original function.
Thus, I find your characterization of the article as "click bait" to be wide of the mark.
And there's counter-evidence (if mostly circumstantial) in that the first known knitted artefacts are from centuries later, to say nothing of knitting spools which they would predate by some 1300 years.
This hypothesis also lacks a lot of explanatory power e.g. why did some of them find (and take) room in coin hoards? Why have they been found all over Gallia, Germania, and Britannia, but not Italia, Hispania, or the Oriens?
People who had access to gold used some of it to create jewellery.
> Why have they been found all over Gallia, Germania, and Britannia, but not Italia, Hispania, or the Oriens?
Certain types of jewellery can be found in certain regions. This can be attributed to specific trading network or local preferences. I don't know if that could be proven, but makes sense to me.
If it were used for that, there would be wear at the bases of the little knobs as the yarn rubs along it. None of the dodecahedrons we have show any wear in those areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_goods
Modern society is not much different: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/ohio-mans-wish-fulfilled-...
> Archaeologists have recovered dodecahedrons from the graves of men and women, in coin hoards and even in refuse heaps, so a blanket explanation for their use has not been found.
There's no indication these were the only things in graves that I can see.
If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.
1. How does it account for the different-sized holes on the dodecahedron's faces? Before you answer "to knit for different sized fingers" let me remind you that knitting doesn't work like that, that is, the diameter of the final product is determined by the distance of the pegs, which is the same across all the faces.
2. How does it account for the similar-looking Roman icosahedrons?
3. How does it account for the fact that knitting was invented hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire?
This is some Joe Rogan-tier crank theory, that no self-respecting archaeologist takes seriously. It's literally based on a single YouTube video, yet for some reason it gets endlessly repeated, probably because it makes people feel good that a random grandma figured out something that the fat cats of the archaeologist establishment failed to crack.
*I hope