Roman Dodecahedron

 

The Claim

Hundreds of strange Roman spheres have been found, and no one has any idea what they were used for.

 

The Roman dodecahedron is a small hollow object normally made of bronze or stone in a dodecahedron shape, which has 12 flat sides. There are holes in each of the faces in circular shapes which vary greatly in diameter, and each one found comes with the rounded pins on each of the corners.

 

The strange thing about these objects is that no one has any idea what they were used for, but many have been found over the years, mostly in the region of what was once Gaulia. This area is made up of modern day France, along with parts of Germany and Belgium, though many have been found in other countries.

 

The Romans were quite well known for keeping records and made many paintings of the things they did, but the dodecahedron does not appear to be in any picture or even mentioned a single time in any records.

 

Since there’s no information of any kind from the people who made them, we can only speculate about their purpose, of which there are many theories. The most common of which is that they were used as some kind of measuring tool, to calculate anything from distances to sizes of water pipes. Other explanations include candle stick holders, religious artifacts, and even some kind of astrological prediction tool.

 

 

The only problem with each one of these theories is that there is no standard size of any kind to the dodecahedron’s, which means that if they were used to measure something they would have to be built specifically for that project, and would be useless afterwards.

 

The most likely explanation would be some kind of religious artifact, as 2 of the dodecahedron’s found had ancient wax residues within them, and some examples found as far away as south-east Asia have been made entirely from gold. But again the Roman gods and religious ways are well known even today, 2000 years later which makes it seem especially odd that not a single one of these objects has been found in a Roman temple or mentioned within their religion.