Maybe it’s the world’s first multi-tool and does all of the above, and more!
Correct. A bigger loom/bobbin, accommodating more pegs yields a wider knitted tube.
A bigger loom with the same number of pegs (just spread out more) yields a knitted tube with a more open, net-like structure which will tend to stretch more readily.
Changing the diameter of the hole in the middle of the loom, with identical numbers and spacing of pegs, makes no difference to the knitted result.
We’re back to the miniscule amount of stuff that survived. Maybe there were thousands of frescos featuring these things and none of them survived, or the surviving ones haven’t been uncovered, or there’s a fresco sitting in museum storage somewhere that nobody has looked at in forty years that would clear this whole mess right up.
That last may not actually be a problem in this context, I’ve only ever heard about “dark data” in terms of natural history collections.
I don’t think that a tchotchke is consistent with the worksmanship, and hence cost, of one of these things. If they were just a fad thing to stick on a shelf, you’d expect something that you can make many copies of cheaply and easily. Or even if there were a few really fancy ones, you’d expect many, many more of the cheap imitations.
True; if it was just an ornament, there should be examples made from fired clay - it wouldn’t be all that hard to make a glazed, pierced clay form in this general shape, unless pottery was not sufficiently robust for whatever purpose this had
There was a very popular Roman dice game- everyone played it. There are frescos of it. We know of a few throws- what they were called and if bad or good, but we do not know the rules.
Some people claim that the Romans kept a lot of records, thus since we have little records of Jesus, he is a myth. But we dont have a single scrap of anything Pilate signed or wrote or had written. In fact, we only know Pilate really existed from a coin and a recently found inscription on a stone-
The artifact is particularly significant because it is an archaeological find of an authentic 1st-century Roman inscription mentioning the name “[Pont]ius Pilatus”. It is contemporary to Pilate’s lifetime, and accords with what is known of his reported career.[2][3] In effect, the inscription constitutes the earliest surviving, and only contemporary, record of Pilate, who is otherwise known from the New Testament and apocryphal texts, the Jewish historian Josephus and writer Philo, and brief references by Roman historians such as Tacitus.
Or silver, gold or iron. But always bronze or another copper alloy.
Iron would not have been impossible, but probably a whole lot more work. They did not have cast iron in the Roman Empire days, so to make one they’d have had to make twelve flat sides and then weld them together. Not impossible, but tricky. The final product would likely have come out a whole lot less regular than the cast bronze ones. Plus iron rusts easily, so few would have survived to this day.
I’ve got no problem with these kinds of conjectures but the different size holes render this problematic to me. They went through all of the trouble to make the sides equal the stuck different sized holes on the things. yet, confoundingly, the dodecks themselves are different sizes.
Okay, but if some sort of religious item, why no silver or gold> Or even electrum, the Romans used a lot of that.
I still think they are Roman d12s. Sometime a few years from now they’ll discover a bunch of Latin character sheets and a gold d20.
Obligatory.
The level of workmanship on these is pedestrian and positively ascetic by Roman bronze working standards (I’ve linked to what fancy Roman bronze looks like already. And Celtic stuff can be even fancier). These are also not marvels of theretofore unknown geometry and engineering, or complicated mechanisms like the Antithythera. They are at the tchotchke end of the workmanship scale, not the fancy side.
Some of the examples just seem a little bit too utilitarian to be ornaments of any kind, religious or just decorative. Some of them are cast as one piece but have casting failures repaired. Some of them are constructed from flat plates soldered together, but the seams are not finished smooth
The fact that these (the examples we have) are all made from bronzes or brasses suggests that’s what they needed to be made from, in order to stand up to some wear or usage or other.
Of course that doesn’t rule out the possibility of them being some ritual object that was related to bronze workers.
We’ve discussed the curious spread of their distribution in terms of climate, but there is another angle to that - it also somewhat corresponds with expansion of the Roman empire into Northern Europe - which could suggest these things had some purpose related to military activity. A taper gauge for making spear and arrow shafts for example.
So you give this object to the person cutting and shaping the wooden shafts. You give the counterpart (basically just a spike or cone) to the blacksmith, to make the sockets that will fit the shafts.
Phials with tapered bottoms would have needed some kind of stand. Like this one.
Maybe these were just fancy stands to go on your dressing table to hold perfumes or oils.
This solid Roman dodecahedron almost certainly was a dice of some sort.
Or because copper alloys were considered aesthetically pleasing…
The Romans at the exact same time period was also expanding in the East - the Balkans, Persia, Judea. Sometimes the exact same legions campaigned in both arenas. Why didn’t the same utilitarian military purpose occur there?
Same objection - tapered phials and amphoriskoi are found throughout the Empire. So why would this not occur everywhere?
Yeah, the variety of hole sizes made me think maybe they would be a sort of universal retort for a variety of such bottles, but it just seems like anyone who needed that (a physician or cosmeticist perhaps) would just source ointments and materials in bottles that didn’t need a fancy stand.
And again, why bronze? If it was a retort for heating things in their bottles, perhaps.
How would that work for the soldered examples?
I’d say probably, but I’ve seen modern desk objects that are dodecahedrons with a month on each side, just for keeping track of which month it is. One with zodiac signs could have been used in the same way.
In any event, the labels at least strongly suggest uses, and explain why a dodecahedron was used. Doesn’t help much with the “standard” Roman dodecahedra.
So you don’t buy that the golden Asian ones are related?
I’d be really surprised if the Asian ones were related. Just a coincidence they are in the same shape. But it’s not like the dodecahedron is a shape known only to an obscure cult or something.