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Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#381

Post by NoobSaibot135 »

karaterobot wrote: post #341
zoky wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your dodecahedron were essentially your “resume”, you’d go out of your way to keep it safe from thieves. Besides, stealing one wouldn’t do you much good, as you’d be discovered as a fraud pretty quickly based on the quality of your work. Having one of these in your possession would be enough to get you in the door, as well as giving your potential employer a quick and easy way to judge the quality of your work. Th…

I don't see anything about the dodecahedrons being signed or stamped or branded in any way, so I can't buy them being a resume. Seems like if it were your personal proof of employability, and you cared a lot about it not being stolen, the first thing you'd put some mark on it to indicate it was yours. And then there's the fact that some of them have been found buried in coin hoards, which doesn't make sense (why woul…

> found buried in coin hoards

Has anyone ever tried matching the sizes/circumferences of the coins with the holes?

Could have been used as a auto-coin sorting device?

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#382

Post by yetanotherloser »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #303
yetanotherloser wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the current view of many scholars is that the Roman D20s were for gaming use as well, if not primarily for gaming use. I would love to see the most recent scholarship on this, though. I assume the actual game is somewhat lost to time: game rules don't generally get written down in any medium that is durable enough to survive thousands of years.

That's interesting, I thought the case made for oracular use when I read about it was reasonable, but I may be a bit put of date. There was a fair bit of weird belief washing around in later Roman times before Christianity won out, though.

As for game rules - we have a tiny enough fraction of all non-elite-literary writing from antiquity that we probably wouldn't have a complete game's rules if they had been in the habit of writing them down - but we have so many surviving bits of writing that we ought to have fragments of rules. They seem rather thin on the ground, which leads me to suspect that written rules just didn't seem that important to most Romans. From Vindolanda to Oxyrhynchus they wrote bills and doggerel and love-life complaints and demands for new socks... but nothing at all that attempts to explain THAC0.

We don't even really know how they played Ludus Latrunculorum, despite finding quite a few sets and more boards - but there are several reconstructions from literary references. One of them I find quite engaging, so I hope it's on the right track.

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#383

Post by yetanotherloser »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #364
yetanotherloser wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods Does it need anything else besides some kind of protractor and ruler?

Making a triangle or square or even hexagon with rule and compass is fairly easy. Making a really regular pentagon also only needs rule and compass, but noticeably more knowledge with them. Try it.

https://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#384

Post by yetanotherloser »

tessierashpool wrote: post #315
yetanotherloser wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Greek letters were used as numbers during the time of the Romans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals also, sorry to be that guy, but D&D hasn't had a thief class since 3rd edition came out, in 2000.

ps good shout on the letters, which I had thoroughly forgotten. The d20s still are odd though.

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#386

Post by dpig_ »

anentropic wrote: post #27
anentropic wrote: post #22

A theory I saw recently suggested that they may have been used to hold candles, as night lights (could still have had some religious or ritual component too). The holes all being different diameters would then relate to different sized candles being needed to last all night, for longer and shorter nights at different times of the year. The twelve faces presumably corresponding to 12 months on the Julian calendar, whi…

OTOH: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron#/media/File... it's interesting that one has no holes but varying sized corner knobs instead, and 20 faces instead of 12 the objects seem related, but the purpose of the latter can't have anything to do with candles presumably

Hmm - roll me a History check.

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#389

Post by jmpman »

bee_rider wrote: post #160
jmpman wrote: post #89

I think it’s part of surveying equipment for a construction site.

For some reason that was what my mind jumped to, but the details seem odd. Apparently some were notched between the knobs, so it seems useful for measuring… and you could imagine eyeballing lots of angles by lining up the knobs in various ways. Maybe even putting a string across some knobs and looking through the hole. But why holes of all different sizes? And it seems weirdly difficult to make a right angle.

I need to 3D print one to mess around with.

Re: Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England

#390

Post by RecycledEle »

happymellon wrote: post #115
throwup238 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it's like a dev who's made themselves some money, getting buried with their C64?

I might just ask them to bury me with a Commodore 64 now that you gave me the idea.

It would be a shame to waste a working one, but maybe I can build a replica?

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