this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
845 points (99.9% liked)
History Memes
1244 readers
1194 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism (including tankies/red fash), atrocity denial or apologia, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Piefed.social rules.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
- !historymusic@quokk.au
- !historygallery@quokk.au
- !historymemes@piefed.social
- !historyruins@piefed.social
- !historyart@piefed.social
- !historyartifacts@piefed.social
- !historyphotos@piefed.social
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then there's the Roman dodecahedron, which truly seems to be a mystery with no modern equivalent, but lots of theories.
You mean the odd shaped candleholder?
It's so you could use candles of different sizes from different vendors without needing a distinct candelabra for each one.
It's a genuinely useful thing to have because the small metal balls would always keep it upright regardless of the shape of the candle. You'd just need to match the diameter of the hole.
They look gambling related to me, but I don't know why that would be in a burial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
I hope my family buries me with my favorite dice set
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/bronze-age-girl-buried-with-more-than-150-animal-ankle-bones-potentially-to-help-her-to-the-next-world
As I recall, the bones were identified as gaming pieces. there's a similar game played in the area, and the winner gets to keep the losers playing pieces.
She was either so loved that a bunch of kids gave her their dice pieces as a symbolic gesture, or she fuckin rekt so many kids at dice one of them up and murdered her. Who can say.
Heckin gamer right there
Put it in your will, and they'll have to.
Perfection.
Some people honor their loved ones by burying them with the things that made them happy. We buried my grandmother with her porn tapes and dildo/vibrator collection.
I don't know if that last part is a joke, but my buddy and his brothers slipped the porn VHS that was still in the VCR when his grandfather died in his casket along with a bottle of Crown Royal.
Not a joke at all. Also, being the fucked up family we are, we weren't not gonna watch it at least for a moment.
My review of Titty Fuck Follies: not my thing, but great fun for the family.
But for serious, being Jewish, they won't let you bury synthetic materials. But when my uncle was asked to bring an outfit for my grandmother to the funeral home, he also packed up the porn and paraphernalia in an HEB grocery bag and took it on down. He asked them to not look at it, but just to bury it with her. They later told us that they had to look at it for liability reasons, but since they knew my grandmother, they totally understood and just casually tossed it in her casket.
Note: my grandmother was well known at her condo for telling all the new residents how to use the bubble jets in the hot tub to have an orgasm.
I did not realize who I was replying to hahaha. So hi there, friend!
I don't believe in an afterlife but if I'm wrong I hope wherever your grandmother is she met up with my buddy's grandpa and they're terrorizing ghosts with porn and toys together.
My grandmother used to talk about how beautiful she was in high school and college, and that she thought everyone should get to be happy, which is why she loved showing off her body to every boy or girl, no matter what walk of life they came from. She also used to tell my oldest sister about how much she loved giving blowjobs, and that my sister should learn to enjoy it because it can be a lot of fun.
I guarantee you that my grandmother has a line wrapped around whenever haunted house you're envisioning, and she's having the time of her afterlife.
-hug- it's always a good day when I get a friendly "howdy" from ya
Legend
Ah yes, religious rituals recorded on tape and an offering for the dead soul to carry with him to the afterlife.
Bro, that's just an ancient massage roller!
Reminds me of like a caliper but for checking girth and like hole size if the holes and nipples are different sizes
Gambling would require they be standardized, and we have enough examples that aren't similarly sized or constructed that seems unlikely.
Unless they had a governing body it's probably more natural to see a diverse set of sizes and constructions. When you're shooting dice in the street it's more fun to have (or make) your own for luck/cheating
It looks like you would wrap fibers around the vertices to make something 3d out of frabric tbh.
Edit: it seems my theory has been largely discounted 😔
I wonder if we have any computer code today where a lack of documentation will bring about similar issues hundreds of years down the line
I have already encountered this
I have created plenty of this, but I’d be surprised if any of it exists in even the next 5 years.
:D
I remember speculation that this could have been used to make gloves. That was discounted?
From the wikipedia
Not entirely discounted but considered unlikely
Mittens it is, then.
The latest theory seems to indicate that they were for knitting gloves. The different size holes create the different size fingers for the gloves. They work perfectly for that purpose.
That kind of knitting hadn't been invented yet by the time the dodecahedrons stopped being made, they didn't all have different size holes, and they don't show signs of wear.
Except that these devices perform the action perfectly, illustrating that perhaps the claim that this kind of knitting hadn't been invented yet, was wrong.
It's like how they keep moving the date for when people first came to the Americas. At first, they thought it happened several thousand years ago, and now it's something like 25,000 years or more ago. They didn't ignore the evidence of earlier migration because they already had a date they were comfortable with. As new evidence was discovered, their story changed.
Nobody knew what these things were for, until someone started to make gloves with them. It's kind of hard to dismiss that, when it works so well for that purpose, especially when the alternative explanation is "I don't know."
Just because an explanation fits well doesn't mean it's the best one, or even correct. According to the Wikipedia article there have been 50 proposed explanations. Did you read through all of them and evaluate them in the historical context, reaching the conclusion that the glove explanation is by far the most likely? Or did you hear that story and think "yeah, that sounds vaguely correct", so now it must be the one explanation you've heard?
Did you even try to look up why we think that kind of knitting hadn't been invented yet?
I haven't seen ALL the explanations, but I've been tracking these things for a few years, and I've seen quite a few explanations, and most of them have seemed more like non-explanations.
When you have an explanation that works, and it produces a product that everybody would have needed on a daily basis (at least during part of the year), it has more credibility than explanations like it was used for gambling, although nobody can explain how or why, which is most of the explanations I've seen.
I've certainly never heard a BETTER explanation. If you have an idea that you think is better than this one, one that scholars have tested and proven, then let's hear it. But until then, this is the BEST explanation that I heard, and demonstrations have proven that it works. So until someone comes up with a better, proven concept, I'm buying this one.
First: we've only found a few of these objects, in a few areas. Why weren't they more widespread? Either 99.999% of Romans had gloves made some other way, or they didn't have gloves. Why didn't they share this development? Why didn't it spread when it was so obviously better?
Second: why can't we find any evidence of the required type of stitching, or of gloves being produced this way? Either they must have discovered a new type of stitching and then discovered these things and never mentioned them to outsiders, or nobody saw the obvious advantages. Which of these makes sense to you?
It's completely fine to simply admit: we don't know. The glove hypothesis makes sense, but it's simply wrong to determine it as the correct solution without any actual evidence.
They have found over 130 of them, scattered across Europe. Presumably many HAVEN'T been found (and never will). Many may have been made of cheaper material like wood, that has deteriorated since then, leaving only the better quality metal ones. That is not a few, in a few places, that is widespread.
As for the products not being around: So what? ALL clothing of the time were natural materials, no synthetics, and they simply didn't survive the cold, damp European climate. Very little textile has survived from the Roman era. Gloves, specifically, take a beating, and gloves with holes were probably thrown away, or more likely, unraveled, and the yarn put to new use.
And no instructions on its use? Did you know that in Europe, there is a museum dedicated to shoes that have been found in walls? As Europe was rebuilt over the last century, they started finding a single shoe in many walls, and started studying them, and eventually created a museum dedicated to it. It was clearly a custom for a long period of time that a shoe was put on the walls of a new building for some reason, but that reason has never been found anywhere.
House building back then would have been done by tradespeople who were mostly illiterate, and while they all knew about the shoe-in-the-wall thing, nobody was writing down their day to day activities and customs. So while we have no written explanations, it was clearly a widespread custom.
That's just how history is - often infuriatingly unsatisfying.
No, that's still very few, in few places. Why didn't we find anything in the main areas of the empire?
So what?! So you can't claim "these things were definitely used for this purpose", since we have never found any evidence for this!!
And that means I can come up with an explanation that makes sense to me today, and decide that it must be the correct explanation, even if surrounding requirements aren't fulfilled, right? After all, we need neither evidence, nor for the necessary techniques to have been developed.
Exactly! And we should leave it at that instead of making it satisfying by settling on a solution, regardless of missing evidence.
130 of a single mysterious item is an enormous amount! It probably represents a miniscule portion of the total that were around, and many of them, perhaps most, were probably made out of much cheaper and disposable materials than expensive metals, so that the average person could afford one. Most of those would be gone, and many more will remain buried forever.
Or perhaps the reason there aren't more, is because it was a specialized trade, and used by a small number of people in a region, those who manufactured gloves, and sold them, as a living.
And creating an actual useful, popular product from an item is strong evidence for it's purpose. If we found an old cart with four wheels, and we could start it and drive it, we would rightfully conclude that it was a mode of transportation, and the guy standing back and saying that we still don't know what it is, until we find some operation manual, is flatly silly.
The only issue with your analogy is that the wheel hadn't been invented yet, so all you found is a wooden plank. "But guys, they MUST have also invented wheels, it makes the most sense!" right?
Sorry, I missed the part where we hadn't invented garments yet. /S
Why do you keep saying it couldn't make gloves because they hadn't invented gloves yet? Clearly, if this makes gloves, they had invented gloves.
Unless you mean something else? What exactly had they not invented yet that proves this couldn't make gloves? Yarn? Goats/ Sheep? Cold hands? Fingers? Because I'm pretty sure they've had all those things going back to cavemen.
Not that your answer matters because I've seen people make gloves with it, so I know it can be used for that purpose.
You won. This is the single most stupid response I've received all year. Congratulations - almost a photo finish!
That's only because you don't respond to your own posts.
Happy New Year!
How do we know that that type hadn't been invented?
Knitted socks were a huge deal when they became a thing in the 1500s - enabled by smooth uniformly sized thin metal knitting needles, which were just then possible with metal technology. We take for granted now that socks are stretchy, but for most of human history socks were stiff like any other fabric without any elastic threads as part of the fabric blend. Or sometimes cloth wraps were used instead of a shaped garment - the Russian military didn't replace portyanki with socks until 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jan/16/russian-soldiers-replacing-foot-wraps-socks
The somewhat similar process of nalbinding was a thing as far back as ancient Egypt, and became common for socks and mittens in Medieval Scandinavia, but isn't as flexible a technique as knitting, and doesn't seem to have ever been used for gloves.
That knitting (and thus knitted socks) was invented in the 200s (when the dodecahedra were made) - and was used for gloves, somehow, and not socks - and yet didn't make societal waves until the 1500s is a wild idea.
https://www.academia.edu/38693060/Bone_needles_and_textile_production_in_the_Roman_time_a_new_proposal
Fascinating read, thanks for sharing!