No. There is a wide variety, but there is a common core of objects that generally have different hole sizes. But even then, some of the holes are only marginally different in size to others. Possibly within the tolerance of making the holes. That is a problem for the suggestion. If a pair of holes are within half a millimeter of one another in diameter, it isn’t apparent that the diameter differences are useful to key another mechanical device to.
There are generally a pair of opposite holes that are almost the maximum possible diameter which appear to be fabricated differently to the others - and may be an artefact of the casting process.
The entire code wheel thing sounds vastly more complicated than needed and, as noted above, really doesn’t seem to actually need the dodecahedra to work.
The wheels have holes in them which are snapped on over the knobs. I guess there could be some wear on the knobs, to a greater or lesser degree depending on what the wheels are made of.
It’s an utterly bonkers hypothesis, but I can’t help but admire the thought that’s gone into it.
A hugely over-engineered solution and overcomplicated method to achieve what is ultimately a fairly simple cipher. If the romans would have used such an encoding protocol, they would have simplified the mechanics of the process way more than that.
It’s a good article, but it was published a year ago in the Smithsonian: it refers to a dodecahedron unearthed in the Summer of 2023. I did like this quote though:
A huge amount of time, energy and skill was taken to create our dodecahedron, so it was not used for mundane purposes. They are not of a standard size, so will not be measuring devices. They don’t show signs of wear, so they are not a tool.
The photo in the Pocket article is this one from Wikimedia Commons, which was uploaded in 2018, so is not the recent find. The Pocket article is a copy of this article in Smithsonian Magazine, which has two photos which do appear to be of the be most recent find.
I still do think that the difference in sizes point to an object used as a combination of fortune telling and used on games. While they could be unrelated, I do think that how some uses of similar sized leather dodecahedrons from the recent past centuries from Europe, point to how the items were likely used in ancient roman times. (How the metal ends were used to keep the leather in place deals IMHO with the issue about how the dodecahedrons were able to roll if they were used as fortune telling dice.)
The smallest there allowed then to use less leather, but well to do folks back then were not incapable of showing off their biggest examples of their trade/office.
As they do today with chess. BTW I pointed before at how decorative jewelry pieces of chess are used nowadays, explaining IMHO why one finds very small examples of the dodecahedroms.
Sure, if you put a steady, point light source inside. But if there was a light source inside of these, it’d have been a candle or something akin to that, with a flame of decent size and probably flickering.
And a candle will leave residue, soot and perhaps wax or tallow, that should still be there on many of them. I don’t know if they’ve examined them for that residue, but I expect any decent archeologist will do that. Non-archeologists might just clean them off and lose any evidence.
