Too little data to say, but it seems like the golden ones have a very clear purpose as beads. The bronze ones from Europe are too big to be beads.
There are plenty of dodecahedra around, sure. But hollow dodecahedra with knobs on all of the vertices and round holes in each of the faces?
Have you made one? The only person I know of who has is @Mangetout , and IIRC, he said they were trickier than they looked (and he has a lot of experience making stuff). Sure, it’s not the Antikytheria, but it’s not a brick, either.
I have not. I have, however, made other (Medieval) bronze lost wax castings, such as tortoise-shell brooches. And I’m familiar with the breadth of Roman bronze workmanship. I stand by what I said.
I’ve already addressed in this thread how Mangetout’s repro differed in several aspects from the probable manufacture of the artefacts, making drawing inferences about difficultly from his work sketchy at best.
And I didn’t say it was a brick. Just not technically difficult to a trained metalworker and not intricate workmanship by Roman standards.
How would that work for the soldered examples?
Assuming 60/40 tin-lead solder, which melts at 188 degC, it would work fine.
That’s less than the burning point of any of the common fuels used by Romans, whether oil, charcoal, wax or wood. So if being used as a retort over a flame, a soldered one is going to have issues.
But it’d be fine in a boiling water bath. Most things that an ancient Roman would be keeping in a retort, you’d probably want that rather than an open flame of uncontrolled temperature, anyway.
So would a ceramic holder, in which case using bronze specifically becomes unnecessary.
I just finished watching a few YouTube videos on knitting with a Roman dodecahedron and they thoroughly convinced me that that is not their intended use. It’s slow and very clumsy. On top of that they didn’t use the holes very convincingly. Example:
Speaking of the side holes, what if they were intended to be looked through, like range finding device?
The holes aren’t standard from one example to another, and even if they were, it seems like it would be a pretty awkward object to use in that way.
That’s why I’m (currently, ask me again tomorrow) favouring the taper gauge idea. No need for standardisation across multiple dodecahedra - you either have a counterpart taper made of bronze or stone that the blacksmith uses to make the sockets on the spear heads, then the woodworker uses the corresponding pair of holes to measure uniform tapers worked onto the end of the shafts they are making, or the woodworker just makes one shaft and leaves it with the blacksmith, then makes the rest.
The dodecahedron isn’t used to shape the shafts, just to measure them for fit, so it receives no significant wear.
Only problem with that idea is… Why does it have knobs on?
(Edit: Actually not the only problem, as there’s a much simpler way to do that; the blacksmith makes one socket and gives it to the woodworker; the woodworker makes a corresponding tapered shaft and gives it to the blacksmith, then they both get on with their work)
And so are gold, electrum, and silver.
If it was heating by standing them in the retort, in a pot of warm water, I think it would work just fine.
Yeah, it’s a brave effort and it needed to be tried, but there just doesn’t seem to be any good reason to make them that way - the hole size doesn’t affect the knit; the benefit of being able to knit five fingers one after another without casting off isn’t really a benefit, as they are only linked together by one strand; might as well just knit them one at a time on a simple bobbin.
Looking at them again, the Asian examples appear to be of different design - they are twelve circular rings joined together by twelve balls, one at each corner - the Roman ones (well, most commonly) are constructed from twelve flat pentagonal faces
The taper gauge idea also faces the question, why six different taper gauges on the same device? Even if you really do have need of six different tapers, it’d be better to have six different devices for it, because there’d be less risk of the person using them accidentally using the wrong one for a particular job.
Oh, I meant to ask about this one before, too: Is there any direct evidence that those items were for use by a sorceress (like, them being found in a shop with a sign that said “JVLIA’S DISCOVNT SORCERY”, or whatever)? Because when I look at that, I see a jewelry-maker’s kit. You can find jewelry that looks just like that at any modern craft show.
If there were six different and distinct types of object to be made (like spears, lances, arrows, etc) . it could make sense to combine them into a set; on some models I have seen, each face had differences in the way the circles were inscribed, so that could have been to make them memorable (possibly memorable to a worker who could not read). I concede the idea is a reach, and why has it got knobs on?
I just watched the BBC documentary about the one found at Norton Disney and although it was interesting, the ‘ritual object’ / fidget spinner seems like the most unsatisfying answer of all.
The key questions to be addressed seem to be:
- Why is it only bronze/brass? Why no pottery version? (if there had been some, it seems likely we would have at least found fragments)
- Why are the holes differing sizes? (clearly this is not accidental)
- Why is there no consistency of overall size across all examples?
- Why is there no consistency of inscribed markings across all examples?
- Why does it have knobs on?
- Why is it found only in a limited part of the Roman empire?
- Why has there apparently never been any useful context for the finds? (the Norton Disney example seemed to be found amongst potsherds and waste thrown into a pit, for example)
My WAG is they are some sort of scrying/fortune telling device. Roll it around in your hands, place it on the table and then there are some sort of tapered objects inserted into the holes. The tapered objects somehow determine your “fortune”. Probably need more than one tapered object per tapered paired holes, otherwise it would only be twelve “fortunes”, multiple objects would allow for a greater number of “fortunes”. This might be why it was valued and of enough importance that some were found in coin hoards. The tapered objects must have been organic, and disappeared long ago. But why make a bronze dodecahedron and use wooden sticks? If I were a shaman/priest, I would want my whole “kit” to match.
A sold dodeck with images would seem to work much better for this. Not to mention that if they were tarot devises, there would be ones made of other materials.