I don't really buy that theory. There's no explanation for why it needs to be this very-hard-to-cast bronze dodecahedron, instead of just a wooden board with pegs and holes, which is all that would be needed for the video above.
Why not? If it was a common item, it would be natural that there a deluxe versions for e.g. the royal household. The cheap and simple versions would have rotted away by now.
The article mentions that none of them exhibit wear marks that are characteristic of tools.
They’ve got a lot of sentimental value to the original owners of those hoards. It actually makes more sense: master blacksmiths were far more likely to be wealthy enough to have coin hoards and considered the objects symbolic of the trade that made that wealth.
A lot of folks in this thread are latching on to this theory and making speculations to support it.
The speculation is that there were created by advanced apprentices. What we’d now call “journeymen.” Most people didn’t move around maybe, but I wouldn’t be that surprised to find that they did.
They absolutely would have moved around since one of the most common ways to get the apprenticeships was to sign up to help with an army that was mobilizing for war. Militaries needed a lot of blacksmiths to tag along as support and they needed a lot of apprentices for manual labor. When they came back from, they often had a little more choice in where to go back to so they had quite a bit more mobility over all.
Not just that, but "head out with the military, stay where you end up (or somewhere along the route)" is a tried-and-true method of moving people throughout history. How else would you end up with Latin dialects spoken over a range from Portugal to the Black Sea?
I like that theory too and offer a followon explanation: to make a dodecahedron you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods, you need to have learned a thing or two to get there. This makes it a better test than, say, an icosahedron. But we do know that the Roman empire wasn't completely unfamiliar with icosahedral dice, probably for a magical or divinatory purpos…
Come now... Saving rolls use icosahedrons. Old-school paladins used D12 for hit points, I don't know about 5E.
If your DM had you use these icosahedrons for saves...
I like the theory that it's an examination piece to qualify as a master metalworker. Casting a flawless dodecahedron could have been a way to demonstrate your skill. The shape is somewhat arbitrary: anything that's both difficult to cast and easy to examine for quality would work, but once people started making dodecahedrons that's what people expected and it became a kind of standard.
The equivalent today would be 3Dbenchy boats -- "we found an identical boat toy design in multiple sites made of different plastic materials, colors and sizes. It is spread universally around the World cities, found in sites of crafts, leading us to believe it is an idol of a new 21st century religion predominant among workers of the arts and crafts"
I like the theory that it's an examination piece to qualify as a master metalworker. Casting a flawless dodecahedron could have been a way to demonstrate your skill. The shape is somewhat arbitrary: anything that's both difficult to cast and easy to examine for quality would work, but once people started making dodecahedrons that's what people expected and it became a kind of standard.
I like that theory too and offer a followon explanation: to make a dodecahedron you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods, you need to have learned a thing or two to get there. This makes it a better test than, say, an icosahedron. But we do know that the Roman empire wasn't completely unfamiliar with icosahedral dice, probably for a magical or divinatory purpos…
>probably for a magical or divinatory purpose rather than determining whether your wizard made her saving throw.
From a certain point of view these are the same thing
There is no mention in Roman/Latin texts anywhere of this particular object, it's quite a specific thing...? Some merchant probably sold it and had an inventory...right?
They mention this in the article - one line of the reasoning is that the lack of mention lends a little evidence to a non Christian religious or folklore practice that would have made a written record forbidden or liable to destruction by authorities.
If they are important, they should appear in drawings, paintings, carvings, statues, etc. Someone should really be searching in these areas.
Every old drawing, painting, carving, statue, etc., is eagerly pored over by historians of that era. Roman historians know about these dodecahedrons and would recognise them if they appeared.
I like that theory too and offer a followon explanation: to make a dodecahedron you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods, you need to have learned a thing or two to get there. This makes it a better test than, say, an icosahedron. But we do know that the Roman empire wasn't completely unfamiliar with icosahedral dice, probably for a magical or divinatory purpos…
> probably for a magical or divinatory purpose rather than determining whether your wizard made her saving throw. Why should I assume humans playing recreational games is a recent invention?
Board games are much older than the Romans, though possibly not older than writing - and texts give us a bit of a clue that some early ones were part recreation part ceremonial. By Roman times pure recreational games were common and reasonably often referenced in their literature. They definitely used cubic dice with numbers on for games (and gambling). The icosahedral dice usually have Greek letters rather than numbers (occasionally symbols IIRC) which make them hard to move a piece to or compare scores; we don't seem to find them with game boards like we do "Latrunculi" counters; there's no textual support for a game with them (weak evidence, true) but there's a fair bit for strong interest in divination and oracles that could use them. So not a dead cert, but fairly likely for the D20s. Whereas when you find a Roman D6, you can be pretty sure it's for gaming and/or betting (or a thief's hit points).
Am totally imagining a futurama episode where everyone is trying to figure out what purpose the dodecahedron was created for and then Fry walks in and explains it was just a mass produced junk art like "live, laugh, love" made by Crate and Barrel.
Same here, but with Centrurion Rory Williams doing the explaining in Doctor Who.