Perhaps a component of a chastity belt?
The fact that they’re all different sizes, and especially after seeing that English one, I don’t see how they were engineered precise and uniform enough for anything accurate like gauging pipes or coins.
Although the crop sowing time theory is interesting, would there not have to be distinguishing marks on the different sides for that to really work? Yes, the holes are all different sizes apparently, but is the arrangement and proportions consistent across all examples?
The big question for me is why these are only found in certain provinces - mostly the Germanic/Gaulic ones, from what I can tell. Why none in Judea? Why not Greece? Why none in Italia itself? It’s not like Judean or Greek Roman-period archaeology is lagging behind that of Western Europe. Which would point to a cultural use rather than a practical engineering use, to me.
Have you seen *Rome *and Spartacus? It seems like the Romans had no “chastity” concept in their culture at all;)
It could have a practical use necessitated by local resources. For example, if these wre candle holders, were candles the primary artificial light souce in Gaul and Germany as opposed to oil lamps along the Mediterranean?
I’ve just seen a dodo fragment in the Museum of London that has three balls at each vertex.
The annoying thing is that they just appear - fully formed - in the record and don’t evolve.
Makes me reluctantly favour a faddish, “ritual” purpose by some flash-in-the-pan local cult.
Like teenagers use empty wine bottles for candles, but we don’t conclude that’s what wine bottles are for?
Totally agree, though the style would make it Assyrian.
I have a charcoal burner for incense that shares features with the dodo. You put charcoal in the chamber through the big hole and burn incense in a little dish on the top. The legs keep it out of the ash.
I know it’s common to take any odd phrase and say ‘band name’, but damn, that would be an excellent one.
Hmmm …
Or a local variant on a practical tool?
It’s a puzzle. You’re missing a string and a couple wood pieces.
This is where my thinking was going too. Imagine you have several wooden balls/disks of differing sizes inside the dodecahedron, joined together with string. You have to get them all out of the the dodo, together with the string, without having the string irreparably tangled up. A Roman Rubik’s Cube.
Speaking of dice, does anyone on the Internet sell RPG dice made in the style of these things?
my aunt had one of these. she called it her “cigarette put-er-outer.” it sat in the middle of her big ashtray. every night when she finished her last cigarette she’d stub it out in that thing because she knew it’d go out. then right before she went to bed she could safely empty the ashtray.
It’a a radio, for talking to God!
Ah, with a separate port for each one!
An engineer has published a paper in EEweb (PDF) that he claims is the definitive explanation of the purpose for the roman dodecahedrons, but I’ll be damned if it makes any sense to me:
I don’t know what a “characterization device” is.
Still not clear what he means, but the real puzzling part is yet to come:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#231f20]D’oh! :smack:[/COLOR]
So they were able collect 18 degrees of data that would be useful if only they had a computer? What is the point? Why would they need hundreds (or thousands, assuming we have found only a fraction of them) of these devices for analyzing shapes of projectiles? How many Romans were engaged in this sort of analysis?
Is this guy trying to baffle us with bullshit? Or is he just another engineer who is obsessed with the technical to the exclusion of the practical?
One of the two. I pretty much understand what he’s getting at, but he’s wrong about what that method would measure, how accurate that would be, and how useful the results. He’s joking, or bonkers.
One Roman to another:
“What are you making? It looks weird.”
“I know, right? I’m gonna make hundreds of these to fuck with the heads of future generations.”
“Right on . . . You should add some balls on the corners…”
You pack that think with dirt, and you have a pretty kickass plant holder.
Or, I wonder if its some kind of platonic bong?