Not full of holes, but yes, “no place to catch the dripping wax”. I put plates under them when i use them.
Actually, the ones i usually use let wax spill on the table, but i also have a cute one that represents Noah’s ark where the wax drips all over the animals, and is a huge pain to clean at the end of the holiday.
Also, i need to buy special candles to use with these candle holders, because they are a funny size and don’t take normal candles.
Even if they were, it doesn’t address the question of what they were made for. This is reminiscent of the panspermia argument for the origin of life. Maybe earth was seeded with life from another planet. Yeah, but how did it start there? It just pushes the question back.
Maybe they were used, second hand, as fishing weights or flog tips or decorative cape buckles. Whatever they might have been used for second-hand, doesn’t help us understand what the intended purpose might have been.
The hardest thing to reconcile is the overall dodecahedral pattern and the holes. What possible use required combining those two features? Especially when the dodecahedron-with-knobs seems to be a constant feature while the size of the holes is all over the place.
The size of the dodecas is all over the place also. The general design, 12 sides with 12 holes of different diameters doesn’t satisfy many functional uses. I do find the knobs unusual, they do seem to be something important as they’d easily break off and could have been cut off when broken, but some seem to have been repaired.
So with nothing further than that information I wonder what the use could have been that would require them to be elevated above a flat surface by a tiny amount.
It’s tempting (and I have in the past been so tempted) to imagine that the pairs of opposing holes form some sort of measuring setup - either a taper gauge (insert a taper in there and if it jams on both opposing holes simultaneously, you made it right), or something where you sight through one hole and the scale of the opposing hole means something in terms of your view.
The flaws in these ideas (well, some of them):
The quality and consistency of the examples is all over the place. It’s almost like they are some theatrical prop that had to look about right in the hand of an actor, for some lost performance of the comedy musical Oops Prefectus, Look at the Knobs on My Bronze Dodecahedron
I don’t think wax residue on a few of them really means anything, because pretty much anything could plausibly have wax residue on it. If you’re using the thing for… whatever, after sunset, or even just have it sitting on the table while you’re doing something else after sunset, you’re probably working by candlelight, and it’s quite plausible that you might accidentally spill some wax from your candle on any given object.
At most, we might be able to conclude that the spilled wax didn’t impair the function of this thing enough that the owner didn’t bother to thoroughly clean it off.
^ This part here may be the key to figuring these things out. What useful things do we have that can be different sizes and still satisfy the same function?
I’m thinking of dice, for example - they can be large or small and still satisfy their intended function. Also,
As long as the opposite holes are proportionally sized, it wouldn’t matter (within reason) how big the overall thing was, it could still be used as a taper gauge. Doesn’t explain the dodec shape though…
If there are six different tapers that need to be gauged, then a dodec shape will be a good one. It has six pairs of opposing holes. I remember reading someone’s analysis that ruled out the taper gauge idea. Don’t remember where I read that, though.
I have to think that the thing is shaped like a dodecahedron either because of some “cultic” reason or because people felt it looked cool. I don’t think that shape was chosen for “functional” reasons.
I mean, it does make a satisfying D12 for tabletop games. But even there, there are simpler shapes that work, like a tapered cylinder with facets, and the dodecahedron is used because it’s satisfying (it looks cool).
The original dice used in D&D were just the 5 platonic solids, which is why dodecahedra were included. But the actual use of the D12 was pretty limited, so they probably could have done without it. I played some D&D back in the 80s and never used my D12 in a game. If we used a base 12 numbering system, I’m sure D12 would have been one of the most commonly used dice and decimal dice would not have been used at all.
Current main uses are for the greataxe damage and hit points for a barbarian. There are a couple spells that use d12, Such as Toll the Dead.
Putting differently-sized holes in the different faces would be terrible if it was supposed to be a die, though. Anyone (including a dice-scammer’s mark) would know that the heavier sides are more likely to land down.
And even if they just made it a dodecahedron because it’s cool, if the functional purpose could be served with a simpler design, we’d expect to see at least some of the simpler design. For a taper gauge, for instance (or for a lot of other proposed uses), it’d be simpler to have two parallel sheets of metal (maybe a single sheet with a U-bend), with whatever number of pairs of holes you needed, all side-by-side. Such a design would certainly be cheaper, and thus probably also more common. But we don’t see any of those. That suggests that the shape was actually essential for its purpose.
Ok, but beautiful objects get preserved. Cheap utilitarian ones get melted down (as well as tossed into the garbage, so they can’t be too cheap). And only metal can be reused so easily of course.
Dodecahedrons were found with coins, militaries, and funerary contexts. What’s the through-line in all of that? Dodecahedrons were a store of value. In the military context they were loot, pilfered locally. This explains the regional variation: soldiers would sell the objects before rotating to areas where they had less value.
ETA below: The holes are not optional. The dodecahedrons without holes are actually mislabeled icosahedron - the surfaces are triangular, not pentagon shaped. (Why do the isosahedrons have knobs though? I perceive lower quality workmanship - note the irregularly sized knobs.)
Yeah. And the holes were apparently optional (some examples don’t have them) whereas the points on the corners were important (not only do they all have them, some were even mended) so i think we can rule out “awkward candle holder”.
but rule in “very awkward candle holder”?
Surely, trying to balance a candle on one of these bad boys without the big holes would be an apt metaphor of the power of faith to light your way in the face of worldly realities and mundane physics.
That doesn’t explain why they were made in the first place.
Saying they were a store of value just pushes the question back: why were they made in the North-western regions of the Empire, and by whom? Why were they only valuable in that area of the Empire?
Pure speculation: one metal smith thought this was a good test to see if his students could do the needed work. His students spread out and used the same shape with their students. This went on for 200 hundredish years. But why did it die out?
Not much of a good view of the dodecahedron interiors; anything useful/noteworthy there? Are they unfinished as opposed to the exteriors?
Right. As far as I can tell, that icosahedron is the only one with that shape and the only one without holes. I looked at all the pictures on Wikimedia that someone posted the link to. All of them, 18 different ones by my count, have holes. Those images do not include the one recently found in Britain, but that also has holes.
One of the images at that wikimedia page is a drawing of a Roman coin rather than a dodecahedron. It’s included because there’s what looks like a dodec along with some other (mystical?) symbols on the reverse side of the coin. The only writing on that side is the word “COPIA” which means “abundance”. That would seem to support some kind of religious/ritual use of the dodecs.
Once again (I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot in this thread) - good Roman bronzework is intricate, finely detailed, elaborate.
While their purpose is a mystery, as bronzework these items are not all that. If they’re supposed to be any indicator of bronzeworking skill, they are not very good ones.
I had several posts above about the topic of what actual masterworks looked like, as well as links to actual fancy Roman bronzeworking.