The Romans were buying knitted and spun textiles from the north-west of Scotland before they even set foot in the south of England. It's pretty well-documented.
I could have sworn that the last time this came up there was a blog where someone had taken measurements from hundreds of them and shown similarities and deduced a use. But darned if I can find it.
The whole statement in the article is utter nonsense: "In that year, over 250 bishops came together at Nicaea to discuss the increasing problems concerning the date of Eastern. At this meting, they decided that from that point on, March 21 would be the vernal equinoctial point, which would mean that the calendar would have the same pace as the solar year. The last dodecahedrons descend from the fourth century AD."
That in 325 AD the vernal equinox fell on 21 March in the Julian Calendar was just a matter of fact. No one except of a few experts cared for more than a thousand years, that the calendar date of the vernal equinox gradually changed, amounting to 1 day aprox. every 128 years.
The "classical" way to "measure" the date of the equinox is by using a so-called gnomon, a vertical stick. At the date of the spring or autumn equinox, the tip of its shadow over the day results in a straight line. Here is an illustration and a longer explanation: https://earthsky.org/human-world/equinox-shadows-trace-a-str...
If they’re tricky to produce well, that suggests another possibility - maybe they were a journeyman piece for bronze crafters. Does it require combining a number of different techniques to produce? Would deficiencies in particular techniques manifest in obvious flaws in the finished artifact?
Or maybe they’re more like fizzbuzz for gallo-Roman bronze artificers. You show up at an interview and they ask you to knock out one of these to prove you’re not an idiot.
> maybe they were a journeyman piece for bronze crafters
If this were the case, shouldn't there be makers' marks on them? Something to identify them as being the work of a journeyman level artisan hoping to use it to prove their worth? Otherwise, one could fraudulently present someone else's work as there own, and undermine the system.
I feel that if they were really part of a 'graduation portfolio' for crafters, it would be much more obvious. Something like an inscription that says "crafted by Albertus in the 14th year of the Emperor Foo".
I like your fizz-buzz theory. If the object is a one-and-done throw away, then you might not bother to put your mark on it.
My guess has been that they are an item a journeyman blacksmith had to create to be promoted to master. From the photos I've seen, they're similar but not identical. So they likely aren't being made as a regular production item like nails or hinges would be.
> My guess has been that they are an item a journeyman blacksmith had to create to be promoted to master.
Seems pretty specific to span two centuries of known construction. Why would they be saved and not recycled? Nearly every medieval village had a blacksmith, with larger population centers supporting more, within the whole of medieval Europe thousands of blacksmiths at any one time, so why have only 116 of these turned up when there should be hundreds of thousands of them?
I think it's very interesting their construction appears to cease just in time for Christianity to take over Europe in the late 4th century. Previously, Rome had 12 principal deities.
As an amateur blacksmith, I can tell you that bronze is very difficult to forge. The minimum working temperature is close to the temperature at which it turns into a liquid, and you would be hard pressed to keep it between those limits. It also doesn't color like iron or steel, and iron and steel have much wider working temperatures. Bronze is much easier to cast than it is to forge.
So, if we're talking about casting, then we have to ask what did they cast in, and what did they use for the molded object? I don't know when sand casting was invented, but I think that's how a lot of modern casting in bronze is done. As for the original piece that was molded, you could do a lost wax type process, and wax was certainly a thing available back then, but would it have been used for this purpose? And how would you do lost wax with sand casting? If it wasn't a lost wax process, then how did you get all those neat little knobs, because otherwise you'd get the equivalent of mold tear outs.
Any sand casted piece would have needed a lot of cleanup to make it look nice, so you'd need to cut, sand, and polish those edges and surfaces.
It would be interesting to have this discussion with someone who is well acquainted with the process of casting bronze, to see what their thoughts are.
The article fails to mention a major hypothesis that immediately came to mind when I saw the object. Wikipedia agrees [1]:
> It has also been suggested that they might have been an object to test the skill of a metalsmith, perhaps as part of a portfolio to demonstrate their capabilities to customers or as a way to qualify for a certain status in a collegium (guild). This speculation is based on the historic cost of bronze and the level of skill necessary to cast such an object.
It’s complexity screams “apprentice’s graduating casting project” which would also explain why some were found with coin hoards - they’re sentimental objects kept by successful blacksmiths; the one thing they’d keep to represent an entire career.
I think it's an interesting hypothesis; it's definitely a complex piece. However there are some things like the different size holes and the little knobs that I don't see adding complexity to the dodecahedron and seem to be more functional to me. It seems like it could be rotated to put the right size hole whereve it needs to be and the knobs are placed so it can stand no matter what hole is chosen
That's actually what gave me the idea in the first place: I think the knobs resemble practice sprues [1] or jig holding points.
The holes would likely have been cut using premade templates so the builders just used a different side pattern on each side, perhaps to demonstrate centering.
Why the specific Gallo-Roman geographic distribution? Presumably blacksmiths existed and needed "visiting cards" across the Roman Empire?
As an impromptu digital armchair archeologist I'd say this very specific geographic dispersion suggests cultural / religious significance. In any case it weighs against a purely utilitarian role (that would easily diffuse across the empire).
Wax residue was found inside "one or two". Possibly used in a ceremony using candles. The protrusions might have been yarn anchors, not to knit gloves, but to form elaborate ritualistic symbols. I.e. imagine the bare metal covered with a colorful pattern that would be wound and unwound to match the occasion.
Considering the size and makeup of the Roman empire, I wouldn't be surprised if there were substantial differences in every-day purely utilitarian activities for no other reason than "that's how we do it here". People didn't even speak the same language (Britain never adopted Latin as a common language, and Gaul didn't until after these devices are dated).
Unfortunately a lot of these details about every-day life are lost to history as no one bothered to write it down "as everyone already knows about it".
Archeologists classifying every object they can’t explain the purpose of as a cult/religious/ritualistic item is a bit of cliche. I wonder what future archeologists might think about some of the stuff we have in a couple of thousand years if some societal collapse occurs in between.
> Possibly used in a ceremony using candles
It’s possible they could have also used it to hold candles outside of religious ceremonies.
I think the major argument against this theory is the map, as the article states. Most of the theories for their use are actually invalid simply by looking at the map of finds.
Fishing, toys, music, games, things that were global in the roman empire.
What the map shows is that it was used in the colder parts of the empire.
That map looks exactly what I would expect it to look like if it was passed on from master to apprentice metalworker as part of a graduating project.
These wouldn't have been products sold to customers and traded, they would have been symbols that the individuals had achieved mastery within a specific lineage of artisans restricted to that region. Almost all knowledge was communicated via oral means because scribes were very expensive and most people were illiterate - there's zero reason to expect a wide distribution throughout the empire.
I think metalworking also has the longest history of sophisticated development in current day Northern Europe. The dispersion on the map I think re-enforces both that history and the notion of a portfolio piece.
Ok but that means there would be more such objects, for every level before mastery right?
And also such objects would be much more rare. Imagine all the objects that have been found and melted down during the last 2000 years. For us to have found over 100 of these so far is already an indication that it was a lot more common than an apprentice piece.
> Ok but that means there would be more such objects, for every level before mastery right?
What levels of mastery? Roman historians didn't write much about the ins and outs of their metalworking industry so we don't know how intricate the process was but apprentices graduating is rather universal (their teachers get tired of them or die eventually, after all). Besides, just because it's an "apprentice piece" doesn't mean that it's made by an amateur, but by a skilled artisan to prove they're ready to go out on their own.
> And also such objects would be much more rare. Imagine all the objects that have been found and melted down during the last 2000 years. For us to have found over 100 of these so far is already an indication that it was a lot more common than an apprentice piece.
Finding only a hundred of these makes them extremely rare. Check out Wikipedia's non-exhaustive list of museum collections of ancient Roman and Greek artifacts [1]. The collections number in the tens of thousands of objects each and that's just the stuff a few collections felt was worth keeping - there is tons more Roman artifacts on the antiquities market and huge troves are still discovered on a regular basis [2][3].
From [3]:
> This guy even got his grubby hands on a Roman dodecahedron, an extremely rare artifact (only 100 are known to exist) whose purpose remains an archaeological mystery to this day. A total of 13,246 artifacts were seized in the raid on his home and from several safety deposit boxes he rented in Lorraine.
But you can't really compare any artifact with a metal object, metal was valuable and often melted down. The ones we know about were the ones not found by battlefield scavengers and other opportunists. Even gravediggers would take metal objects and melt them down.
“Ok but that means there would be more such objects, for every level before mastery right?”
If bronze is expensive, then poor quality versions could simply be melted down to raw material.
I like this idea. And I struggle to imagine the scenario, because it seems like it would also have social aspects which we can’t know without written testimony.
If the metal is expensive, how is to valued compared to other goods? In the modern world we have tons of stuff, but to what degree is this the same in the ancient Roman world? Who pays it’s cost? If you’re an apprentice could you afford to keep it—especially if you’re not very good (haha).
> Fishing, toys, music, games, things that were global in the roman empire.
I'm fairly certain that every-day practices for all of these things were far from universal across the empire; it's a huge assumption to think that, especially considering that we don't actually know all that much about some of these thing and that we don't know what we don't know (e.g. it was only a few months ago that they found evidence of gladiator fights in Britain; it's entirely possible – even likely – that there were wide-spread well-known games in some regions that we just don't know about).
I'm not saying it can't be related to heat, but I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion based solely on the location where these things were found.
Each object has 12 sides, so 12 holes. For hundreds of exemplars thats thousands of holes. The holes are described as having different sizes on the same dodecahedron. For being an object of mystery, one would assume a catalog of features to have been constructed, but I am not aware of any.
Not unreasonable; an exact dodecahedral shape is equally challenging to construct geometrically in any material, and probably more difficult to build in stone or wood than in wax or clay. Artisans and amateurs of different specialties might have emulated each other.
If you have metal working tools, wood or stone isn’t a bad medium to design small objects. I would expect many more wooden etc examples to have been created that didn’t last.
Also they look cool. Also they're a platonic solid. The golden ratio is built into pentagons, they're tricky to construct with a compass, basically they're cool
One of the suggestions was as a mounting point for metal or wooden poles. This suggested, to me at least use as a joint for scaffolding. The holes of differing sizes accommodating pole diameters suited to each purpose for a given scaffold.
On the outside the protrusions could have been used for tying ropes that secure the joint to the pole. Could have been very strong if also threaded inside the dodecahedrons as well. All reusable and modular. Alright, may be a total fantasy though.
The thing that nullifies this as an idea for me is it would be expected therefore to find absolutely thousands of them. I don't know enough about it, but I got the impression it's much less than that, and it'd seem brass would last better.
Regular dodecahedra don't tile space, so these wouldn't make much sense as scaffold nodes. For regular space frames with identical nodes, truncated octahedra are more useful.
I would also suspect that, if they were used for building purposes, some of these artifacts would be found in situ with poles still inserted into or through them, thus being evidence of their use and removing all ambiguity.
As there is only ambiguity in the analysis of these, according to the article, then my conclusion is that no dodecahedrons have been recovered showing evidence of being used like this.
I can only imagine some archeologist looking at the Filipino giant spoon/fork hanging on our kitchen walls and wondering what it would be used for.
It's not like anyone actually writes down house decoration theory. You just sorta pick up on it based on visiting a bunch of people's homes in a community.
But it does have cultural significance. Filipino dishes are served with a fork and a spoon, not with a knife as is common in the west, or chopsticks as in some other Asian cultures. It is a very culturally specific thing, and something that hopefully is written somewhere. If not, maybe this little conversation will do the trick and be referenced ages from now
Because if you do art, you want to make something unique. Artists don't create exact replicas of the same object so often that a hundred of them are found over 1000 years later (which implies that there were probably many thousands of these).
This would suggest that the "cool S" that showed up in notebooks, on walls, etc. throughout my youth was a religious/ritual symbol. Same with stuffed squirrels and singing bass and "Bless This Mess" crochets and barn stars...
And going back to the original question, making those dodecahedrons would have required considerable expense, skills, and effort. That's not the kind of thing that can spread as a low-effort fad, and an artist who's going to spend that much time on something would be even less likely to make an exact replica rather than something original.
It’s a chandelier/candle holder or heating device, is it not? Wax was even found on one. The different size holes accommodate different candle sizes.
They were made with a copper alloy and thus conduct heat efficiently. That also aligns with the reasoning used to justify the gloves theory (i.e. they were primarily found in colder climates).
Maybe it wasn't finished? And the ones out of stone could be a poor persons attempt, because stone also retains heat.
I actually like any theory related to heat because that's what the map indicates. Any other theory is related to things and actions that were common throughout the empire.
Maybe. I tried to find a catalogue of dodecahedrons, but I couldn't really find any in a few minutes of searching, so I'm not sure if all except one doesn't have any holes, or if there are more of them. Many of the images seem to be of the same few objects.
As for heat: how did people heat their homes? Rich people had their fancy underfloor heating, but what did poor and middle-class people use? In Celtic and medieval times they would typically use a hearth (i.e. fire) – it seems to me a candle just doesn't give enough heat, and you're going to need a hearth anyway for cooking. I would imagine that's also what they used during Roman times since that's what's used both before and after the Roman era.
When a type of object is ubiquitous enough and has the ability to serve multiple purposes, even those it wasn't specifically designed for, it will inevitability be used for those purposes.
Astrology makes sense to me. 12 sides for 12 months and the zodiac. A platonic solid is attractive to use for something that models the universe (star and planet alignment).
I think the “proof of metalsmith skill” theory is most likely. Perhaps slightly higher than simply journeyman/apprentice finishing project; since the particular difficulties lie more in geometry than metalworking, this might be a kind of “Geometer’s Guild” entrance exam piece. It reminds me a little of the more modern “Turner’s Cube”, a challenge of machining skill given to apprentice turners not too long ago (https://makezine.com/article/digital-fabrication/3d-printing...).
The process to make one of these dodecahedrons involves geometrically constructing a pentagon, forming it into a mold, casting from that mold 12 times, centre-finding either the mold or each pentagon, forming a centered circular hole on each given center, joining the 12 pentagons at precise angles, casting 20 spheres, and joining one sphere to each vertex.
The ancient Greek mathematicians were fascinated with compass-and-straightedge constructions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straightedge_and_compass_con...), and posed (and sometimes solved) many such constructions, particularly constructions of regular polygons (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructible_polygon). Constructing a right angle from a line is almost the most basic operation, and repeating that two more times constructs a square, so squares are trivial to construct (4 sides, trivial). The process for an equilateral triangle is not quite trivial, but it is simple (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilateral_triangle) - simple enough that its proof is given at the beginning of the first book of Euclid’s Elements (3 sides, simple). Doubling the sides of a given polygon is also simple, so from a triangle you can get a hexagon (6 sides, trivial), and from a square you can get an octagon (8 sides, trivial).
That’s 3, 4, 6, 8 - what about 5 and 7? For constructing the heptagon of 7 sides, the Greeks considered this problem to be “obstinate”; I believe Gauss was the first to prove it is actually impossible.
For 5, the regular pentagon, constructions using just a straightedge and compass were given by Euclid in Elements and by Ptolemy half a millennia layer, but they are certainly not simple (here is an animation of one such method https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry//construct-pentagon.html).
The full list is something like
3: simple
4: trivial
5: hard
6: trivial, just double a triangle
7: obstinate, later shown impossible
8: trivial, just double a square
9: obstinate, later shown possible but extremely hard
10: trivial, just double a pentagon
11: obstinate, later proven impossible
12: trivial, just double a hexagon
So among the first several regular polygons, the pentagon is by far the hardest to construct that wasn’t obstinate/impossible at the time. This makes it the perfect shape to test a geometer’s skill; they would have had to understand the hardest shape in the first book of Euclid’s Elements.
(Centre-finding on a pentagon is also somewhat complicated relative to the other shapes, though not by as much as construction: https://youtu.be/RxYfdNrt4Sw)
Next we move to the dodecahedron. There are only five Platonic solids, believed at the time to have special properties such as bei...
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#
Yep! https://www.romandodecahedron.com/calendar
Should those be “Easter” and “meeting”? I’m not sure if these are misspellings or spellings I’m not familiar with.
That in 325 AD the vernal equinox fell on 21 March in the Julian Calendar was just a matter of fact. No one except of a few experts cared for more than a thousand years, that the calendar date of the vernal equinox gradually changed, amounting to 1 day aprox. every 128 years.
The "classical" way to "measure" the date of the equinox is by using a so-called gnomon, a vertical stick. At the date of the spring or autumn equinox, the tip of its shadow over the day results in a straight line. Here is an illustration and a longer explanation: https://earthsky.org/human-world/equinox-shadows-trace-a-str...
That’s what I recall from last time this went around at least.
I've crafted a few in various media. Getting it right is tricky. Really makes you appreciate 3d printing.
Or maybe they’re more like fizzbuzz for gallo-Roman bronze artificers. You show up at an interview and they ask you to knock out one of these to prove you’re not an idiot.
If this were the case, shouldn't there be makers' marks on them? Something to identify them as being the work of a journeyman level artisan hoping to use it to prove their worth? Otherwise, one could fraudulently present someone else's work as there own, and undermine the system.
I feel that if they were really part of a 'graduation portfolio' for crafters, it would be much more obvious. Something like an inscription that says "crafted by Albertus in the 14th year of the Emperor Foo".
I like your fizz-buzz theory. If the object is a one-and-done throw away, then you might not bother to put your mark on it.
Seems pretty specific to span two centuries of known construction. Why would they be saved and not recycled? Nearly every medieval village had a blacksmith, with larger population centers supporting more, within the whole of medieval Europe thousands of blacksmiths at any one time, so why have only 116 of these turned up when there should be hundreds of thousands of them?
I think it's very interesting their construction appears to cease just in time for Christianity to take over Europe in the late 4th century. Previously, Rome had 12 principal deities.
So, if we're talking about casting, then we have to ask what did they cast in, and what did they use for the molded object? I don't know when sand casting was invented, but I think that's how a lot of modern casting in bronze is done. As for the original piece that was molded, you could do a lost wax type process, and wax was certainly a thing available back then, but would it have been used for this purpose? And how would you do lost wax with sand casting? If it wasn't a lost wax process, then how did you get all those neat little knobs, because otherwise you'd get the equivalent of mold tear outs.
Any sand casted piece would have needed a lot of cleanup to make it look nice, so you'd need to cut, sand, and polish those edges and surfaces.
It would be interesting to have this discussion with someone who is well acquainted with the process of casting bronze, to see what their thoughts are.
> It has also been suggested that they might have been an object to test the skill of a metalsmith, perhaps as part of a portfolio to demonstrate their capabilities to customers or as a way to qualify for a certain status in a collegium (guild). This speculation is based on the historic cost of bronze and the level of skill necessary to cast such an object.
It’s complexity screams “apprentice’s graduating casting project” which would also explain why some were found with coin hoards - they’re sentimental objects kept by successful blacksmiths; the one thing they’d keep to represent an entire career.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
The holes would likely have been cut using premade templates so the builders just used a different side pattern on each side, perhaps to demonstrate centering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprue_(manufacturing)#Injectio...
As an impromptu digital armchair archeologist I'd say this very specific geographic dispersion suggests cultural / religious significance. In any case it weighs against a purely utilitarian role (that would easily diffuse across the empire).
Wax residue was found inside "one or two". Possibly used in a ceremony using candles. The protrusions might have been yarn anchors, not to knit gloves, but to form elaborate ritualistic symbols. I.e. imagine the bare metal covered with a colorful pattern that would be wound and unwound to match the occasion.
Unfortunately a lot of these details about every-day life are lost to history as no one bothered to write it down "as everyone already knows about it".
> Possibly used in a ceremony using candles
It’s possible they could have also used it to hold candles outside of religious ceremonies.
Fishing, toys, music, games, things that were global in the roman empire.
What the map shows is that it was used in the colder parts of the empire.
These wouldn't have been products sold to customers and traded, they would have been symbols that the individuals had achieved mastery within a specific lineage of artisans restricted to that region. Almost all knowledge was communicated via oral means because scribes were very expensive and most people were illiterate - there's zero reason to expect a wide distribution throughout the empire.
And also such objects would be much more rare. Imagine all the objects that have been found and melted down during the last 2000 years. For us to have found over 100 of these so far is already an indication that it was a lot more common than an apprentice piece.
What levels of mastery? Roman historians didn't write much about the ins and outs of their metalworking industry so we don't know how intricate the process was but apprentices graduating is rather universal (their teachers get tired of them or die eventually, after all). Besides, just because it's an "apprentice piece" doesn't mean that it's made by an amateur, but by a skilled artisan to prove they're ready to go out on their own.
> And also such objects would be much more rare. Imagine all the objects that have been found and melted down during the last 2000 years. For us to have found over 100 of these so far is already an indication that it was a lot more common than an apprentice piece.
Finding only a hundred of these makes them extremely rare. Check out Wikipedia's non-exhaustive list of museum collections of ancient Roman and Greek artifacts [1]. The collections number in the tens of thousands of objects each and that's just the stuff a few collections felt was worth keeping - there is tons more Roman artifacts on the antiquities market and huge troves are still discovered on a regular basis [2][3].
From [3]:
> This guy even got his grubby hands on a Roman dodecahedron, an extremely rare artifact (only 100 are known to exist) whose purpose remains an archaeological mystery to this day. A total of 13,246 artifacts were seized in the raid on his home and from several safety deposit boxes he rented in Lorraine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_of_Greek_and_R...
[2] https://www.ksl.com/article/24751877/10k-roman-artifacts-fou...
[3] https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/60269
If bronze is expensive, then poor quality versions could simply be melted down to raw material.
I like this idea. And I struggle to imagine the scenario, because it seems like it would also have social aspects which we can’t know without written testimony.
If the metal is expensive, how is to valued compared to other goods? In the modern world we have tons of stuff, but to what degree is this the same in the ancient Roman world? Who pays it’s cost? If you’re an apprentice could you afford to keep it—especially if you’re not very good (haha).
I'm fairly certain that every-day practices for all of these things were far from universal across the empire; it's a huge assumption to think that, especially considering that we don't actually know all that much about some of these thing and that we don't know what we don't know (e.g. it was only a few months ago that they found evidence of gladiator fights in Britain; it's entirely possible – even likely – that there were wide-spread well-known games in some regions that we just don't know about).
I'm not saying it can't be related to heat, but I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion based solely on the location where these things were found.
Each object has 12 sides, so 12 holes. For hundreds of exemplars thats thousands of holes. The holes are described as having different sizes on the same dodecahedron. For being an object of mystery, one would assume a catalog of features to have been constructed, but I am not aware of any.
I believe they were used to test coin sizes (could be used by both scrapers and verifiers), see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35946841
Such a hypothesis should be testable: catalog the hundreds of dodecahedra, one row per item, and 12 columns for the radii.
Collect all occurring thousands of radii and sort, and observe density peaks and compare age of item and coins of era with radii.
On the outside the protrusions could have been used for tying ropes that secure the joint to the pole. Could have been very strong if also threaded inside the dodecahedrons as well. All reusable and modular. Alright, may be a total fantasy though.
The thing that nullifies this as an idea for me is it would be expected therefore to find absolutely thousands of them. I don't know enough about it, but I got the impression it's much less than that, and it'd seem brass would last better.
--nvrmnd. Apparently there's only 1. Cube
Though, makes me wonder - what about when constructing domes?
As there is only ambiguity in the analysis of these, according to the article, then my conclusion is that no dodecahedrons have been recovered showing evidence of being used like this.
It's not like anyone actually writes down house decoration theory. You just sorta pick up on it based on visiting a bunch of people's homes in a community.
And going back to the original question, making those dodecahedrons would have required considerable expense, skills, and effort. That's not the kind of thing that can spread as a low-effort fad, and an artist who's going to spend that much time on something would be even less likely to make an exact replica rather than something original.
They were made with a copper alloy and thus conduct heat efficiently. That also aligns with the reasoning used to justify the gloves theory (i.e. they were primarily found in colder climates).
Also not convinced it will be all that stable as a candle holder.
I actually like any theory related to heat because that's what the map indicates. Any other theory is related to things and actions that were common throughout the empire.
As for heat: how did people heat their homes? Rich people had their fancy underfloor heating, but what did poor and middle-class people use? In Celtic and medieval times they would typically use a hearth (i.e. fire) – it seems to me a candle just doesn't give enough heat, and you're going to need a hearth anyway for cooking. I would imagine that's also what they used during Roman times since that's what's used both before and after the Roman era.
I'd love to have a replica for that purpose, I wonder if someone makes them.
Edit: of course they do, one search away. A nice conversation starter :)
No one is certain what Roman bronze dodecahedrons were used for (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717215 - Dec 2021 (207 comments)
What were these Roman objects used for? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237271 - Nov 2020 (37 comments)
The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439351 - Nov 2019 (7 comments)
Another theory of mine is a candle holder which adapts to stump size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta#History
Roman fidget spinner
(i.e. an object to play around with your hands to keep you more calm)
that is a holy hand grenade
The process to make one of these dodecahedrons involves geometrically constructing a pentagon, forming it into a mold, casting from that mold 12 times, centre-finding either the mold or each pentagon, forming a centered circular hole on each given center, joining the 12 pentagons at precise angles, casting 20 spheres, and joining one sphere to each vertex.
The ancient Greek mathematicians were fascinated with compass-and-straightedge constructions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straightedge_and_compass_con...), and posed (and sometimes solved) many such constructions, particularly constructions of regular polygons (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructible_polygon). Constructing a right angle from a line is almost the most basic operation, and repeating that two more times constructs a square, so squares are trivial to construct (4 sides, trivial). The process for an equilateral triangle is not quite trivial, but it is simple (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilateral_triangle) - simple enough that its proof is given at the beginning of the first book of Euclid’s Elements (3 sides, simple). Doubling the sides of a given polygon is also simple, so from a triangle you can get a hexagon (6 sides, trivial), and from a square you can get an octagon (8 sides, trivial).
That’s 3, 4, 6, 8 - what about 5 and 7? For constructing the heptagon of 7 sides, the Greeks considered this problem to be “obstinate”; I believe Gauss was the first to prove it is actually impossible.
For 5, the regular pentagon, constructions using just a straightedge and compass were given by Euclid in Elements and by Ptolemy half a millennia layer, but they are certainly not simple (here is an animation of one such method https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry//construct-pentagon.html).
The full list is something like
3: simple
4: trivial
5: hard
6: trivial, just double a triangle
7: obstinate, later shown impossible
8: trivial, just double a square
9: obstinate, later shown possible but extremely hard
10: trivial, just double a pentagon
11: obstinate, later proven impossible
12: trivial, just double a hexagon
So among the first several regular polygons, the pentagon is by far the hardest to construct that wasn’t obstinate/impossible at the time. This makes it the perfect shape to test a geometer’s skill; they would have had to understand the hardest shape in the first book of Euclid’s Elements.
(Centre-finding on a pentagon is also somewhat complicated relative to the other shapes, though not by as much as construction: https://youtu.be/RxYfdNrt4Sw)
Next we move to the dodecahedron. There are only five Platonic solids, believed at the time to have special properties such as bei...