Very unlikely to be a toy. These were very expensive items, at least the bronze ones were. Bronze was an expensive material in those days, and people didn’t expend that much on things for kids.
Not all over Western Europe. Britain, eastern France, the low countries, and Germany are where most have been found. A few outside that area, but none in Spain or Portugal. But I agree that a local cult may be the answer.
I’m only relying on what sources I can find online, but there seems to be widespread reporting that traces of wax have been found on some examples.
Well, “it had religious significance” is what archaeologists say instead of “I give up, we don’t have a clue”, but yeah, they might be cult items.
I’ve done quite a lot of bobbin knitting and lucet braiding, including making my own looms and bobbins in various sizes and designs. Problems with the glove-knitting tool hypothesis:
If they were originally intended to be candleholders, you’d expect wax residue on virtually all of them. But some of them could have come into the possession of people who had no idea of or didn’t care for their original purpose, and those people used them as candle holders.
I do wonder how many of the examples that have been found were complete. On researching, I found one example online that was a partial, basically a corner with the round stud attached. I imagine this was the result of someone intentionally breaking one up and using the pieces as a substitute coin.
I would have thought that being buried for more than a thousand years might make it sort of unlikely. I find it more remarkable that any of them retain traces of wax.
I mean, I do think they are absurdly elaborate for anything as mundane as a candle holder, unless it was a candle holder for some non-ordinary context or purpose.
Maybe it was an ‘adult’ toy.
Fnarr, fnarr.
The modern equivalent in terms of embedded cost, cryptic non-utility, abstracted design, association with wanky or rarified settings and propensity to end up in landfill would be this thing.
And that is my take - its a non-functional object, with some pseudo-spiritual association, showing that the person is an adherent to a particular belief. I’d peg it as low-level ritual, rather than religious. It would be in someone’s house partly because people believe but mainly because they want to indicate to visitors that they believe [whatever - cosmic unity? amazeball numerology?], while secretly they are baffled at what the fuss was all about.
The moment they die, the kids consign it to oblivion.
Upthread, there is mention of a few small dodecahedron made of gold being found in Asia, and many websites mention a few of the dodecahedron found in Europe were made of stone. However, I have not been able to find photos of any except a small selection of the bronze ones.
That might be confirmation bias. More archaeological digs are done at battlefields and towns were more likely to reuse the metal.
I have to agree with this, I was thinking there might be a thread or wool use and wool probably would never wear on the bronze. I’ve seen enough boat parts where even hemp lines under stress barely wore on brass and bronze cleats. (Bronze is harder).
Aha! Here’s an image of two of the “gold polyhedral beads” found in Asia. The one on the left is from Vietnam and the one on the right is from Burma.
This website mentions a neolithic stone dodecahedron from Scotland, but the author of the website can’t prove whether it is a fake or not.
https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/neolithic.html
Here is a color photo of the “gold polyhedral beads” with the Burmese one on top and the Vietnamese one below, along with a link to the article the images came from.
The Scottish carved stone spheres or petrospheres are about 5000 years old, far predating the Roman or Gallo-Roman bronze dodecahedra. I wonder if the references to Roman dodecahedra made of stone are a conflation of the two different types of artifacts.
Yeah, the stone objects just don’t seem like they are related except by accident of geometry.
From the images of the “gold polyhedral beads”, it looks like each of the 12 faces is a simple ring, not a flat surface with a hole in the center. The beads are 12 rings soldered into a dodecahedron configuration with 20 balls soldered on as vertices. Alternately, maybe it was cast from a wax original assembled in that same manner, but that sounds like unnecessary extra steps.
Those gold Asian ones, though, definitely look related. There, they’re definitely used as beads, though that might or might not have been their original purpose: It might be that someone got their hands on one and didn’t know its original use, and so used it as a bead.
I’m not seeing anything that can definitively scale them, but they also look significantly smaller than the bronze European ones.
Given them, my tentative guess is leaning more towards ritual objects. Bronze ones were more common, just because bronze is cheaper, but some were made of gold. But because gold is more expensive, the gold ones were made smaller. Once their original use was forgotten, the bronze ones (at least, the ones that weren’t scrapped and melted down-- Who knows how many of these there used to be?) were discarded, but the gold ones were still pretty trinkets: They could have been melted down, but there was little need to, since a given weight of gold is worth the same no matter its shape, and so you might as well leave it in the pretty shape. And, as pretty trinkets are wont to do, they got used in trade, and eventually made their way to Burma and Vietnam, where the new owners (knowing nothing of their original purpose) used them as jewelry.
The gold one looks more representative or symbolic than functional, whatever the purpose might have been.
Clearly some of the Gallo-Roman bronze workers had far less skill. This one is shoddily constructed in comparison to many of the others, with a weird number of faces (18) and an assembly method similar to the Asian gold beads rather than the more uniform flat sided dodecahedra.
This bronze dodecahedron is the one found the furthest north, at Corbridge near Hadrian’s Wall. It has slashes on the edges, which may or may not be indicative of anything. I think I see anywhere between four and seven slashes on various edges.
