Absolutely no dodecahedrons have been found in Rome itself, nor in Greece, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Romania…
Most of the sites of Mithraea are where the army was stationed in the northern part of the empire
There were many mithraea in Rome itself (one estimate says almost 700), as well as many on the Asian frontier.
The area where the concentration of evidence for Mithraism is the most dense is the capital, Rome, and her port city, Ostia. There are eight extant mithraea in Rome of as many as seven hundred (Coarelli 1979) and eighteen in Ostia. In addition to the actual mithraea, there are approximately three hundred other mithraic monuments from Rome and about one hundred from Ostia.
Not a single dodecahedron from Rome, though.
If the relationship you’re postulating exists, we would expect sites there and the Numidian and Syrian frontier to also have these artefacts. Especially in places like Dura-Europos, where the preservation level of other artefacts is quite remarkable, and there is an intact mithraeum.
Also, have these artefacts actually been found at the same sites as mithraea? Or just a nebulous “in the same region as a lot of Mithraic stuff”? Like I said innumerable posts ago, the regional association with the syncretic Gallo-Roman and Germano-Roman religions is a lot tighter. Jupiter columns, for instance, having a Germania-Gaul-Britain spread.
Last night I watched a History Channel show about torture devices and whatnot. Roman dodecahedrons weren’t discussed, but one of the talking-head historians was wearing mini replica ones as earrings.
@DrDeth - has your wife actually used a dodecahedron to knit?
I was curious about how people thought this would work. There are videos of people showing how to do it, so I watched one. She took at least 5 minutes and made one finger. Even on double time it was painful. So what I don’t know is how the palm is made. I assume the fingers would be sewed on after the palm, but any size small enough to make the finger would be way too small to make the palm.
The technique shown in the video is called spool knitting. It produces the same fabric as knitting but is a very different technique.
My opinion is that it was not used for knitting - the shape is too cumbersome, while not providing any advantages. And, IMO, someone could easily infer a simpler design that was easy to use.
FYI, it’s called a spool knitter because it’s easy to make with a wooden spool and a few nails.
Spool knitting explanations of the dodecahedra are (I believe) spurious. On the face of it, it might seem like a knitting loom/spool with different sized holes in it could be used to make gloves for different sized fingers, but this is not the case. The diameter of a knitted tube produced by a knitting spool/loom is dependent on the number of pegs and the space between them (which, on a Roman Dodecahedron, is the same on every face)
Not to anyone who has actually done spool knitting 
No, but something rather similar- however, she relaxes while knitting and fingers were too fiddly to relax with so, now she makes shawls and hats mostly,
But she insists it can be used for that. That doesnt mean that was it real purpose. You can use an iron as a hammer, but that is not what it is made for. So- “knitting” is a possible use. Do I think it is the real use? I kinda doubt it, but my mind is open- we simply dont know.
Knifty knitter? (Sic)
I’d be interested to hear about it if she did try. As someone who has used spool knitters and knifty knitters, it’s my position that anyone who used it once to knit would make (or get someone to make) something not so cumbersome. Based on watching a video of someone using it that way. And why didn’t they figure out how to make larger ones with more pegs to make socks?
The only ground-breaking thing I’ve seen is with the post on the Zodiac thing from the 1950s.
So is that what this thing is? A Zodiac symbolic thing?
The dodecahedron was a light-show thingy. The nodules were used to mount shadow puppet objects. Light was provided by the sun: the cult ran the light show in a darkened room. It’s reminiscent of and possibly inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave. It was diverting at the time, but not wildly successfully artistically which explains its demise. It was supplanted by the disco ball in 417.
More seriously, here’s a research proposal. Go to etsy and look up dodecahedron. You find a number of Roman replica, but also some modern interpretations. The interpretations tend to present dodecahedrons with identical sides, which makes aesthetic sense. So I’m tentatively leaning against the knick-knack or paperweight hypotheses, because the ancient objects are beautiful despite the varying sizes of the holes, not because of them.
Here’s a modern example of a dodecahedron shadow lamp, which prompted my hypothesis. Here’s another. They too have identical sides, so I’m fully convinced my hypothesis is likely or even viable. Here’s one with differing sides, but there’s no snap in and out feature, which the ancient version might have.
Are the holes noticeably different in size?
Over a three to one difference on most dodecahedra.
What makes it hard is that no two dodecahedra are the same. Which makes assigning any universal meaning to them difficult.
The large variation in overall size is another confounding factor.
Edit added
Indeed so. I’ve done a bit myself - including making my own custom knitting looms of various sizes and peg counts - this is one of mine:
I wonder if the idea of glove making came from someone who just looked at one of the faces and thought, “five knobs, five fingers, hmm”.
I pondered the idea of them being knitting bobbins when I was in the process of attempting to make one (it didn’t go that well) - I don’t think it was so much the count of the knobs that suggested it to me, but rather, the fact of knobs arranged around a hole - it’s just a configuration that suggests ‘knitting bobbin’ to someone who is already familiar with knitting bobbins
But the Roman Dodecahedra are not knitting bobbins (at least not for any style of bobbin knitting that survives today), because:
- At best (that is, in the case of the most suitable example artifacts), they are very awkward to use that way
- Many examples of dodecahedra simply could not be used at all for this purpose, so what are those for?
- They pre-date the earliest established examples of loom knitting by many centuries (excluding nalebinding, but that’s sort of irrelevant because the tools have almost nothing in common with loom knitting)
- There’s no reason to have different-sized holes - if the peg count and spacing is the same around each face, the knitted tube will be the same
Most of the ones you’ll find on Etsy or similar tend to use at least some degree of mass-production: It’s easier to make 12 copies of the same face than 12 different faces. That probably wouldn’t have been true at the time the originals were made, though.
To me, the zodiac 12-sided die found in Geneva is mischaracterized as a Roman Dodecahedron. The zodiac die is in a museum in Geneva at the Cathedral of Saint Pierre. It is solid, made of lead and plated with silver, has no holes, has no knobs on the vertices, and dates to a century or two later than the hollow bronze knobby dodecahedrons.
Below is an image of the Geneva zodiac die. Although it shows up on some of the lists of Roman dodecahedrons, it does not seem similar enough to me.
Lost Wax casting was invented around 3000BC, so sure they could have.