Oh, of course, prismatic dodecahedral refractors! Why didn’t any of us think of that?
How can we have been so … blind??!1!?
My wife says that things like that CAN be used for knitting gloves. And they are only found in colder climates. But I dont think this is the answer.
They sometimes uses real sheeps “knucklebones”, and I have seen roman dice- lead and dried clay- they are hardly vegas quality dice. So, a “maybe” but I dont think so. None have been found with wax (which can survive) so, likely not candleholders.
Yep.
They are almost always copper alloy, usually bronze, which wasnt cheap.
No, bronze is tough, but constant use as “dice” etc would mean we’d find some with the knobs broken off- it wouldnt happen often, but it could.
That seems to me to be the best guess. If you dont have a scale and a set of weights, one of these would do. Coin sizer and spot clipping in silver coins.
Since they were sometimes found in coin hoards, the idea they were used to check coin sizes and for clipping works.
yes, lost wax casting.
Only one of those have been found, but there have been found 20-sided dice crafted from rock crystal, and the consensus there is fortune telling- or gaming.
That falls into the same issue as many other explanations: Why a dodecahedron? You could serve that purpose (and many others) with a flat sheet of bronze with holes in it. Which would be much easier to make.
My guess about the icosahedron is that some time after the heyday of the dodecahedra, someone found one and didn’t know what it was, but they thought it was nifty, and decided to make a full set of Platonic solids in a similar style. But either they got bored with the project after the icosahedron, or the other three just didn’t survive.
And it’s no great stretch to say that the purpose of a die was probably “fortune telling or gaming”. But those were, in fact, clearly dice: Every face had a different marking on it (letters, in that case, IIRC). None of the bronze objects have dice-like markings on them, nor is there any reason to suppose they’re related.
I am skeptical of the hypothesis that this was a “tool” of some sort. If it were a tool, I would expect to discover a low-cost or ruggedized version of it. But the dodecahedrons that we’ve found appear to be finely crafted, and were probably very expensive in their day. This doesn’t scream “tool.”
This was the obvious practical difficulty I immediately saw, too, in addition to all the other issues with that paper.
Do their holes match the hoard coin sizes? 12 different sizes of coin (except where the holes are the same size)? And different sizes of coin all over the place?
It’s needlessly elaborate for a coin gauge. A flat plate with holes in it would be just as useful. Also I think the holes would be slots not circles.
Also, coin changers traditionally worked by weight, not size.
Not to mention that the dodecahedra cover a range of sizes, as do the holes in them. The one certainly about a coin gauge is all copies of it would need to be identical or it is worse than useless.
Do you have a cite for that?
I’ve seen a few articles stating that wax WAS found on some of them. I’m not sure how reliable these are.
“Some have reportedly been found with a wax residue which adds weight to this theory.”
“A candle holder. (Wax residue was found in one or two of the objects recovered.)”
Especially for the smaller and more common coins - those often just look like a flattened blob (because they kinda are).
Clearly, we are missing parts.
I suspect they were parchment or other easily decayed material.
The problem is that all those tiny parchment User Manuals got put in the back of Roman junk drawers, and everybody lost them, so when the nepotes came to visit, picked up the dodecahedra, and asked "Quomodo hoc uteris? ", nobody knew the answer.
Well, they used the lost wax casting to make them, so traces would be found. But nothing likr candle stubs or dripping etc. I had not read any were found with significant wax. But you dont need all those different sized holes nor the little nubs for a candle holder- besides the Romans liked lamps and they have found zillions of those.
The issue with scales is that you have a delicate instrument and a set of exacting precise weights. The dodecahedra would be a simple, sturdy way to look at coins.
Mind you, just one theory among many.
IANA expert on Roman coinage by any means.
My general expectation is that manufacturing tolerances were sloppy back then. Coins weren’t circular; they were circular-ish. And kinda soft, so prone to damage in circulation.
A gauge that’s perfect isn’t going to be useful to validate coins that can be assumed to be imperfect the day they’re made. And if the gauge itself is imperfect, now what?
Plus, a scale is going to be a lot easier to make and use than a dodecahedron. Especially since you don’t need measurements, just comparisons: Keep one each of all of the standard coin denominations, and there’s your comparison weights.
I found it remarkable that, during an 1892 Asian bicycle tour, William Sachtleben apparently needed to pack his own set of scales:
…the weight of the Chinese money necessary for a journey of over three thousand miles was, as the Russian consul thought, one of the greatest of our almost insurmountable obstacles. In the interior of China there is no coin except the chen, or sapeks, an alloy of copper and tin, in the form of a disk, having a hole in the center by which the coins may be strung together. The very recently coined liang, or tael, the Mexican piaster specially minted for the Chinese market, and the other foreign coins, have not yet penetrated from the coast. For six hundred miles over the border, however, we found both the Russian money and language serviceable among the Tatar merchants, while the tenga, or Kashgar silver-piece, was preferred by the natives even beyond the Gobi, being much handier than the larger or smaller bits of silver broken from the yamba bricks. All, however, would have to be weighed in the tinza, or small Chinese scales we carried with us, and on which were marked the fün, tchan, and liang of the monetary scale. But the value of these terms is reckoned in chen, and changes with almost every district.
A few thoughts on that.
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wouldn’t they have cleaned the wax from casting before using the object, for whatever purpose?
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Do wax-cast artifacts generally have traces of wax on them?
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wouldn’t wax have decayed away after 2000 years?
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Different sized holes mean it can take different sized candles.
Note, I’m not claiming that it definitely was a candle holder, but it is one of the more sensible ideas.
I don’t know about “exacting precise”, but yes, a standard set of weights wasn’t some obscure thing. Romans kept standard sets in public places (Temple of Castor, for one) and merchants’ and moneychangers’ sets would be compared to those, and marked - a large number of surviving Roman weights bear inscriptions indicating official verification (e.g exactum ad Castoris or similar for weights checked against the Temple standards). There’s no similar indication of any official standard on the dodecahedra…
A scale in itself is not some “delicate instrument”. It’s literally just two pans hanging from a balance beam. Way easier to produce than the dodecahedron, I’d wager. And it was the standard symbol the Romans associated with commerce, too.
No. Any wax that’s there is going to be there in place of metal that you actually wanted to cast. And in lost-wax bronze casting, you want to melt all wax out before you pour the metal. Molten bronze is between 950°C and 1,150°C. That is way, waaaay above the flash point of beeswax. You don’t want the sudden vaporization of trapped wax - that can break your mold or have other unpleasant effects.
If there is wax on these things, it’s way more likely to be from polish or buffer than anything else. Wax coatings are still the museum standard for copper alloys even today (although nowadays it’d be synthetic waxes).