Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
“The imagination races when thinking about what the Romans may have used it for. Magic, rituals or religion - we perhaps may never know.”
Yes, magic, ritual, or religion—the only conceivable purposes for anything archeologists can’t immediately identify.
And by immediately you mean hundreds of people working full time for decades trying to figure it out.
It didn’t take them decades to come up with the idea that they were for magical use, it took them decades to fail to arrive at a better consensus.
First thing that pops into my head is that it was used to lash poles together for tents, awnings, military banners, etc. I am no doubt wrong. But for some reason I think they would work nicely for that purpose, and make the whole kit portable and easy to set up and tear down.
That might actually have been a good guess.
I’d go with some sort of game- like jumping jacks, maybe. Or some sort of weird bocce ball.
Erector bobs
multifaceted cock rings
Those Romans... they knew how to party.
I think they're dice.
That is certainly one possibility, although I think the idea that these were some sort of worship object or fortune telling device by the Neoplatonists is the most likely answer, as the dodecahedron was an especially sacred object to them because it was to Plato.
A Midplatonist work attributed to the Timaeus of Plato's dialogues discusses it-
According to “Timaeus” the universe has two causes: Mind, which governs rational beings, and Necessity, which governs bodies and all irrational beings. Interpreting Plato literally, “Timaeus” affirmed the temporal creation of the cosmos, and while stating that the cosmos is capable of being destroyed by the one who created it (the Demiurge), he denied that it would ever actually be destroyed, since it is divine and the Demiurge, being good and divine himself, would never destroy divinity. In what is possibly a later addition to the text, “Timaeus” assigns numerical values to the various proportions produced by the mixture of the Same and the Different (these being the two opposing forces, productive of all motion, growth, and change in the cosmos, as discussed in the Timaeus dialogue). The substratum of all generated things is matter, and their reason-principle or logos is ideal-form. “Timaeus” then proceeds with an account of the geometrical proportions of the cosmos, finally declaring that the image of the cosmos is the dodecahedron, since that is the closest approximation to the perfect sphere, which is the image of purely intellectual reality.
Neoplatonism was a pretty big deal in the Empire in the third century.
Either that, or the Romans manufactured and buried them in order to confuse people 2000 years later.
Seems pretty simple to me. Everybody loved to gamble, so they needed to be sturdy, and also big shiny metal trinkets are cool. They have different sized holes to denote the different values of the sides, and the knobbies make them bounce and roll in unexpected ways and keep them from rolling once they come to a rest.
The number 12 was really significant to early Mesopotamia and continued on trhu the Roman age. Babylonians used Base12 instead of Base10, gregorian calendar has 12 months, etc
If it was religious in nature, why wouldnt there be any manual or depiction of it in any of the existing art and structures?
IMO, the answer is because it was too mundane, like a shoelace or a paper clip to us. Someone above mentioned as possibly being for tying tent poles and the like together, which is now my new favorite theory 😃
Oh is that why the fraudulent archaeology group I'm on started talking about this weird meme that seems to think that the Romans understood the concept of knitting and that these would be practical to manufacture for that task.
We've been having a good laugh about it, although it's the typical "what do you scientists know about anything" story that way too many people believe.
Ugh I hate this kind of folk knowledge circlejerking
If it was done with prior knowledge of Roman textile making (i.e. the Romans actually did know how to knit), it would be an okay archaeological experiment, and experimental archaeology is a valid form of archaeology.
But this was not that. This was some lady who knew how to knit, saw one and said, "that could be used to knit gloves."
And the knitters who are part of the group have chimed in and let us know that it is far less practical than a knitting frame anyway.
Thanks. I was about to embarrass myself 😅
Just so anyone else doesn't- the Romans didn't know how to knit (it originated around the 11th or 12th century in the Middle East): https://motherknitter.com/history-of-knitting/
That link mentions that finger knitting was practically prehistoric. Are we confident that there was not some rudimentary form of knitting being practiced?
There are a great many Roman fabric samples from dry areas like Egypt, along with stone carvings of people making Roman textiles and writings about Roman textile-making and none of it suggests they understood the concept of knitting.
More to the point, these objects would be less practical than a knitting frame anyway.
And it doesn't answer all questions about the object. Why is the object polyhedral if you only use one side to do the knitting. If it's a mundane item, why did they make it stupidly complex when a simpler shape would do. It also ignores why the wholes are different sizes when the size of the holes doesn't affect the knitting.
