Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

Post by jazzyjackson » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

mkehrt wrote: post #245

hosh wrote: post #236

I remember seeing someone’s demo of using them for knitting. Absent any better explanation, this seems pretty reasonable to me. Example video: https://youtu.be/76AvV601yJ0?si=7qk7VWBHJnxubs1j

This is a theory that keeps coming up on the internet. However, roman dodecahedra predate knitting by almost a thousand years. The earliest known knitting was from the 11th century ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting#History_and_culture ), while the earliest dodecahedra are from the 2nd century ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron#History )

Post by arp242 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

jakubmazanec wrote: post #283

How much Roman writing has survived? If this item was so common, it's strange that it isn't mentioned more in literature.

Post by tessierashpool » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 11:07 PM UTC

yetanotherloser wrote: post #269

whoopdedo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 numb…

Post by scythe » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

mkehrt wrote: post #247

mildchalupa wrote: post #16

I thought it was determined to be a glove finger knitting apparatus.

Roman dodecahedra predate knitting by almost a thousand years. The earliest known knitting was from the 11th century ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting#History_and_culture ), while the earliest dodecahedra are from the 2nd century ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron#History )

Post by taneq » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 11:41 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #280

tarikjn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

If you try hard enough you could probably come up with some resemblances to male/female parts and thus classify this as belonging to a fertility cult.