That Roman dodecahedron mystery finally clicked for me after seeing one in person at a museum in Belgium

3 comments

3 Comments

clicked for me" - I gotta disagree. If anything, seeing one in person made me more confused about why people are so obsessed with figuring them out. It's a chunk of bronze with some holes in it. Big deal. People have been making weird decorative objects since we figured out how to melt metal. Not everything needs a grand purpose or a complex explanation. Sometimes a fancy paperweight is just a fancy paperweight. The real mystery is why we keep pretending these things must have been some ancient GPS or knitting tool when they could just be the Roman equivalent of a garden gnome.

the_ryan1mo ago

It's like how we obsess over finding a hidden meaning in every weird looking rock or rusty tool we dig up.

alice_palmer2027d ago

and honestly, @the_ryan has a point about decorative objects, but here's the thing - I've been on enough digs where context is everything. You find a dodecahedron in a hoard of everyday tools, it's one thing. But when you see it sitting alone in a display case at the museum in Tongeren, I could tell it was deliberately polished, kept in good shape, not thrown away with trash. That's a practical clue right there. So yeah, your mileage may vary, but from my experience handling artifacts, items that get that kind of care usually had some kind of regular use, even if we can't pin down exactly what.

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