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Comment by octaane | Hacker News Reader

My favorite theory that I've seen to explain these has been that they were a token showing the prowess/status of a metalworker or stoneworker - a kind of verifier of skill of the individual. In a mostly pre-literate society, where craftsmen could be itinerant, this theory made the most sense to me.

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The big question there is why these metalworkers showed up in only one part of the empire, one of the less wealthy regions, and not one with some unique needs for bronze casting. Note that these are cast bronze, using the term "metalwork" conflates smiths who work with tin, gold, bronze, and iron, but those were different professions. This isn't a blacksmith showing off his ironworking skills, it's a person of a different profession casting fine bronze. Hard to say why you'd have mendicant bronze workers casting things, I don't know of any records of but it's a very limited area for so many finds, while this same work was needed all over the empire, why nothing in Spain, Italy, North Africa, or the eastern provinces where they'd need the same? Why just that one highly restricted range within Rome that coincides with Gallia and Britain?

I have always thought that if they were candle holders it would make perfect sense. And they would be much more needed in the northern part of the Roman Empire than southern. And this is why no accompanying materials have been found in the dirt. Because wax is malleable and would disintegrate over time.

But yeah why would they have ever gone to the south?

Then the balls on the corners were merely decorative? Maybe.

You don't need 12 holes of varying sizes to hold a candle, and these would have been disproportionately expensive to make for that role.

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.

The Romans mostly used oil lamps rather than candles, the use of candles as a popular light source developed among early medieval Christians who started to use them in their churches after the olive oil supplies dried up in the late/post Western Roman empire. These were too early to be tied to candle use (and strangely distributed geographically). Also the Romans had no kind of industrial standardization or production, every candle was hand made and unique, all the wax/tallow was valuable, so the later Romans who would have used candles would have used a candle holder designed to capture any lost fuel to reuse.

I would expect a lot more variability if this would be the purpose. For example, instead of corner balls, why not be a little creative and make them cones. Also, the holes in the faces always being of different sizes is peculiar. Then there's the icosahedron with balls of different sizes. Reading the wikipedia page only deepens the sense of mystery, but some use in astrological divination or the like seems most plausible to me.

While I don't endorse this particular theory, considering that something like a gotshall block or a fizzbuzz is proof of a certain skillset, it is certainly possible the corner balls being cones is not a comparable proof of work

Still doesn't make sense to me. Those programming tasks have to be a certain way because they have a very specific use outside of the testing. If that's what you imply, then we're none the wiser, still having left unexplained what that use might be.

In the masterproof example, the purpose of the sphered joint is whether the maker can draw and round every sphere while not compromising the rest of the shape. It is not the end shape that is important, it is how the craftsperson is able to execute it

Expecting variability is a weak argument in my book. If there is some benchmark for skill, like a dovetail joint, the craftsperson is not going to "go rogue" but rather show the discipline required to exactly recreate this thing.

(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?)

Apprentice projects are still a thing where the apprentice system is still in place. It varies depending on industry but you will be given a low level mostly pointless high tolerance task you must complete(make a perfect(we will verify it with a micrometer) cube out of steel using only a hand file), this mainly proves you have the correct mindset to work in that industry.

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.

I can't believe it wasn't documented anywhere at least once. We can piece together Roman GDP from records, but no one ever said what these gizmos were??

Literacy was much lower, and writing much more expensive. People didn't communicate through writing unless it was really necessary, and were generally much more selective about what to write down.

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.

Tax records don't get copied over and over again by generations of scribes.

True, but the sheer amount that was produced means that some, through fortunate circumstances, have been preserved to the present day:

https://www.richardcarrier.info/papyrus/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44968442

Only 3 library shelves worth of classical Roman writing survives.

Are you referring to manuscripts? Or to some specific period? Because we've got rather a lot of text from Rome in general.

Talking about classical Latin literary texts up to a couple hundred AD.

History is full of stuff so commonplace that no one ever wrote it down. One example (mentioned in passing here [1]) is that from the Medieval period up until the mid-19th century, European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

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...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peor%C3%B0

I also like the Land of Punt, an entire country that nobody wrote down the location of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Punt

> European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

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).

And our descendants are going to hate us for doing this on an even more massive scale.

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?"

I saw a video by an expert on Medieval weapons, demonstrating various arrowheads and their uses. For one of them, he said that we know the Europeans had it because it was pictured in Medieval manuscripts, but there is no record of what it was used for.

Doesn’t explain why mostly women were buried with these.

And most have been found around present day France.

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