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The mysterious dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire

atlasobscura.com

101–103 of 103 posts

Re: The mysterious dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire

#101
post #79
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It merely suggest that those are not art.

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.

Re: The mysterious dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

The bulk of artifacts that survive to this day are pottery, jewelry, and metal Roman coins. Two of those three categories were mostly metal objects that could have been melted down but weren't. Collections of Ancient Roman artifacts are full of metal objects that are orders of magnitude more common than these dodecahedrons.

We have many more examples of Roman weapons made up of much more valuable metals that survived.

Re: The mysterious dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire

#103

They were used to measure the amount of pasta noodles depending on the amount of expected guests. Way more elegant than what we have from ikea today. Another theory of mine is a candle holder which adapts to stump size.

Interesting, I was thinking perhaps it was to hold soft boiled eggs such that it was convenient to dip strips of buttered toast into the yolk.

I like that theory too. Nice kitchen aids they had back then
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