Oh well, I suspected that too. Wikipedia does mention that Myth-busters did a replica and:
On MythBusters ’ 29th episode (23 March 2005), ten hand-made terracotta jars were fitted to act as batteries. Lemon juice was chosen as the electrolyte to activate the electrochemical reaction between the copper and iron. Connected in series, the battery produced 4 volts of electricity. When linked in series, the cells had sufficient power to electroplate a small token and to deliver current to acupuncture type needles for therapeutic purposes, but not enough to deliver an electric shock to MythBusters co-host Adam Savage who was instead pranked by co-hosts who hooked him up to a 10,000 volt cattle fence shock generator.[21] Archaeologist Ken Feder commented on the show noting that no archaeological evidence has been found either for connections between the jars (which would have been necessary to produce the required voltage) or for their use for electroplating.
I would think that no electroplating was done (one of the main bullshit claims), but knowing what the ancients did with early steam power, I would think that is there was any current made in those Babylonian devices, that it was used only to impress the ones that did not belong to the priestly class.
And then forgotten for thousands of years after that priestly class faded.
Or the perfectly mundane “rotted scroll cases” explanation actually explains it without any need to invoke mechanisms that we know don’t actually work for the real thing (the copper rods don’t stick out so you can’t get a short circuit)
Perhaps. My pitiful Googling hasn’t turned up any examples of the Roman Empire using codes/ciphers outside of military communications. The Caesar Cipher, a substitution cipher that shifted the alphabet by three positions, is mentioned frequently as being used for communications to military leaders.
Caesar is also implied to have used the cypher for his private correspondence, in Seutonius. And there’s stuff like the SATOR square, which is found all over the place. Pliny also mentions the use of codes by the Pythagoreans, in Naturalis Historia, so the Romans had precedent for esoteric uses of codes.
I doubt they were common. And I doubt the overlap between those writers and Gaulish speakers was that great. And they did write about the Greek bone versions. And Caesar was a noteworthy personage in a way some borderlands spy was not.
We also have no Roman writings on the SATOR squares…
I don’t think people appreciate how little extant Roman writing we actually have, either.
I think this is unlikely for several reasons. First, they aren’t all that finely crafted. If you want to brag about a skill, Michelangelo did this when he was 23. Apprentices usually practiced on things they would eventually be producing. Why make a decahedron to show you could do this?
And if this was just a practice exercise, wouldn’t the bronze be melted back down and used for something more important?
I’m not thinking of budding Renaissance artists; I’m thinking of ancient Roman artisan blacksmiths. As for why the bronze wouldn’t be melted down, I imagine the dodecahedron would be sitting on the blacksmith’s shelf: today’s analogue might be a diploma on the wall of a dentist’s office.
There are problems. The geography of finds is too wide to be the work of a local master or local guild, and too narrow to be something standardized among Roman blacksmiths. It is also odd that we haven’t found other surviving journeymen projects in other parts of the empire, or for that matter around the world. Just dodecahedrons. To my knowledge.
The cypher hypothesis OTOH has a clearer geographic justification. The fact that we know of other cyphers doesn’t impress me: the Caesar cypher is incredibly crude, the sort of cypher that would be widely known after it became obsolete. The dodecahedron cypher had antecedents and decedents. It relies heavily on security via obscurity: that’s the sort of thing that can become obsolete in 200 years. Also, would I expect ancient militaries to possess cyphers that are unknown today? Yes.
Dodecahedrons are dated from the 100s to 300s. The fall of the Western Roman empire occurred c. 376-476. So the dating seems ok, at least roughly. Though generalized chaos could disrupt a lot of institutions and practices.
A cypher tool makes some sense. It explains why the knobs are there, and why no obvious markings otherwise. The dodecahedron shape allows multiple long messages to be encoded at once. The different sized holes and concentric rings could simply be for obfuscation, or they could have made the code more complex by indicating different letter substitutions.
That it could also be passed off and/or actually as an ornament, fortune teller, or gambling device is a useful attribute for a cipher device that must be carried from source to destination, that applies to most possible purposes and is the reason why these objects survive.
You linked to a Roman military diploma, indicating honorable discharge from service and the award of Roman citizenship. I assume the producer of the dodecahedron was not full time military. That assumption may or may not be accurate. Would a craftsman receive a diploma from their trainer?
Wrong, I was not aware. My knowledge of late ancient / early medieval European history is spotty at best. Up to a few weeks ago, I vaguely thought of Gaul as a mainly French thing, based upon my studies of Asterix and Obelix. I appreciate your factual corrections in this thread.
They very well might, but if so, it wouldn’t be a bronze one. The whole bronze military diploma system was to serve as an archival record that was verifiable in remote provinces. What would the function of the dodecahedral “diploma” be, in comparison? A knick-knack for the shelf?
I brought those diplomas up because you were making the analogy to a diploma, and I was saying the Romans had diplomas, but not for trade skills, that we’ve ever found.
Roman apprenticeships (which, by the way, were usually governed by intricate contracts) were for fixed terms, and during the course of that, apprentices might have to demonstrate their skills to outside examiners in their craft (more so in the academic & scribal arts), but there is nothing in the written corpus about having to produce masterworks. All the writers, like Pliny or Vitruvius, who touch on artisans or skills, don’t mention formal testing or masterworks. None of the collegia writings mention it, whereas they do mention grades/hierachy - you’d think if there was such a thing, they would mention it alongside the grades.
All indications are that advancement/skill in a Roman profession was assessed at a much more personal, ongoing level by the instructor themself. Also, that trainee would either be related to the instructor, or come from a family that also worked in that trade. So the other people qualified to judge their work would also be familiar with their work.
One other thing - in the Medieval guild system, it was the guild that retained the masterpieces, not the master craftsmen.
That’s going to confuse the hell out of future archeologists. “We’ve got these gizmos that appeared in parts of Europe for a short while and we’ve never figured out what they were for then 1,700 years later they’re everywhere. Some sort of religious revival? Who knows!”
On the romandodecahedron Reddit, vacciprata has been posting chunks of Robert Nouwen’s “Roman Dodecahedron: Myth & Enigma” translated into English. Nouwen includes information on the metal composition of the dodecahedrons. Almost all were bronze (an alloy of primarily copper and tin), but the Kenchester dodecahedron is made of iron. Parts of the Bonn dodecahedrons (at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany) were scanned as being high in aluminum and silicon.
Would aluminum and silicon be showing up in EDS scans because they are contaminants from the soil, and are just in the surface layer, or does this mean they are actually part of the bronze alloy?
This one appears to be the Kenchester dodec (the first link should take you to the page about this one). The picture looks like it’s mostly covered in rust. Yet the text says it’s bronze. Someone wasn’t paying attention when they wrote that description.
Picture of those:
They look cleaned up, so I would not expect any significant surface contamination.
The actual museum it’s in lists it as bronze.In more than one place. It does have what looks like iron oxide corrosion, but that may also be a coating from burial in clay or similar.
More importantly, if it were cast iron, that would be an extremely big deal, as AFAIK it would be the first cast iron Roman object found.
They’d be part of the alloy, as contaminants from the original source minerals (the same way arsenic and other elements get in). Roman copper alloys were usually fairly pure, but this might be some remelting of other sourced bronze or just shoddy foundry work.
It is quite annoying that so much “information” about Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons seems to be hearsay or irrelevant conflations of somewhat similar objects. Many sites claim most dodecahedrons were bronze, but some were made of stone, iron, or gold, or were silver-plated.
Stone: The 5000 year old Scottish petrospheres bear little similarity to the Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons.
Iron: The Kenchester dodecahedron is the only one I have seen specifically claimed as being made of iron, but the museum where it resides says it is bronze.
Silver-plated: The only one I find as being silver-plated is the 12-sided astrology die in a museum in Geneva, and it is much newer than the Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons, made of lead, not hollow, and doesn’t have knobs on the vertices.
Gold: The Burmese and Vietnamese gold dodecahedrons are bead-sized artifacts, soldered together from rings and tiny balls. Although similar in appearance to Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons, the construction method is completely different and they seem to most likely be jewelry worn in strands with other beads.
All of those are already pictured up-thread. The only new image I have come across is for a gold one allegedly from India that dates from 300 - 100 BCE. I don’t find this one mentioned anywhere other than the ArtefactPorn Reddit, and I don’t how big it is.
