Roman Resources

[malins]

Anyway ... something else.

Roman dodecahedrons! ... hollow mystery objects, usually cast in bronze, over a hundred of them have been documented since the 18th century, their origin is attributed to the first to fourth centuries AD.

Almost all of them have a surprising set of conserved features over this time ... the knobs at the vertices, the presence of circular holes, and the fact that (in almost all cases) the holes are obviously deliberately sized differently in relation to the faces.


What is variable is their size, they are generally described as an object that will fit in the hand, roughly from 4 to 11 cm in diameter.

And there is also one example of an icosahedral shape that's similar, and has only two holes in it ... and there are some intsances of the dodecahedral shape were the holes are apparently all the same size. What is an absolute requirement seems to be, having a roundish knob/peg at each vertex. I haven't found unknobbed examples, or ones where there were spikes or rods, instead of rounded knobs.


They are usually found in the northern areas of the Empire (modern day Germany, France, Britain especially) but there doesn't seem to be evidence of them existing there in pre-Roman times.


There isn't any generally accepted idea what they were good for; the easy route to go is of course "duh it's a ritual object", it's been suggested they might have been used for rangefinding, coin testing, astronomical purposes etc. or more down to earth practical applications, such as a knitting or weaving tool.
Maybe it's an ancient fidget spinner though.
Any measurement tool idea needs to take into account the widely varying size, and while some are very precisely shaped, others are more crude.
They will definitely work to measure out portions of spaghetti ...

some links ... https://www.historicmysteries.com/roman-dodecahedron/

The Mysterious Bronze Objects That Have Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries

They've been discovered at Roman-era sites, but no one knows what they're for.

www.mentalfloss.com

 

[Loxuru]

Anyway ... something else.

Roman dodecahedrons! ... hollow mystery objects, usually cast in bronze, over a hundred of them have been documented since the 18th century, their origin is attributed to the first to fourth centuries AD.

Almost all of them have a surprising set of conserved features over this time ... the knobs at the vertices, the presence of circular holes, and the fact that (in almost all cases) the holes are obviously deliberately sized differently in relation to the faces.

Strange objects...!
Some would say, this is proof that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and they have explained to the people what viruses are, using large scale models?

 

[Migoz2]

The simple answer is: the Romans played Dungeons & Dragons......

 

[malins]

The simple answer is: the Romans played Dungeons & Dragons......

and they were always cheating, because the sides of the d12 are differently weighted.
That way the roman legions would always win.

 

[malins]

Roman dodecahedrons!

The plot thickens!

The following, from Southeast Asia, are made of gold and much, much smaller, worn as jewelry it's assumed. But there seems to be a connection to Rome...

"the polyhedral gold bead from Khao Sam Kaeo, in eastern peninsular Thailand, is stylistically identical to those from Oc Eo in the Mekong Delta, and to numerous similar beads from Pyu sites in Burma."


https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/2072 , Figure 3

Is there a connection?

Most Chinese scholars agree that polyhedral beads were foreign products traded overseas from the west (Ceng 1990; Lin 2006; Peng 2006). lin Meicun argues that these types of beads were a Roman product that testify to the active participation of the Roman world in eastern trade ( Lin 2006 : 152). However, Lin’s argument is based solely on the evidence of polyhedral beads found at the Oc Eo site along with Roman artifacts such as coins, seals, and glass. On the other hand, Louis Malleret (1962) argued that polyhedral beads were locally produced in emulation of Roman samples. evidence of local gold production has been found at the Oc Eo site in the form of a jewelry workshop including specialist crafts tools and fragments of gold (Higham 2004). ... Findings of imported goods originating from Persia, Gandhara, and Bactria in mainland China and at port sites in South China and Southeast Asia suggest that both overland and overseas routes were in use. ... These findings further support strong cultural and commercial connections between Southeast Asia and the Greco-Buddhist region and the argument that gold ornaments and possibly Greco-Roman artifacts reached Southeast Asia and South China via overland and overseas routes.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/211322771.pdf , page 313 / 320

This would suggest that the Roman dodecahedrons, or at least knowledge of their shape, might have travelled as far as the Mekong Delta, but that they were used as an interesting design inspiration for jewelry, their other uses being unknown or not applicable in the Southeast Asian context. (the Roman originals are far too large and heavy to be jewelry pendants).

Of course there is no reason to assume that people there didn't use the Platonic solids as design elements independently. But it's interesting that all of the examples of what they call 'polyhedral beads' are dodecahedrons with circular openings in the faces of the pentagons and knobs at the vertices, and that without specifically referencing the Roman ones, various authors have concluded that they are connected to Roman trade.

 

[Praefectus Praetorio]

For those here (like me) who have not yet (or in my case, never will) have the opportunity to tour the Roman Forum. A hi-def walking look.

 

[Frank Petrexa]

The plot thickens!

The following, from Southeast Asia, are made of gold and much, much smaller, worn as jewelry it's assumed. But there seems to be a connection to Rome...

"the polyhedral gold bead from Khao Sam Kaeo, in eastern peninsular Thailand, is stylistically identical to those from Oc Eo in the Mekong Delta, and to numerous similar beads from Pyu sites in Burma."

View attachment 979444
https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/2072 , Figure 3

Is there a connection?

Most Chinese scholars agree that polyhedral beads were foreign products traded overseas from the west (Ceng 1990; Lin 2006; Peng 2006). lin Meicun argues that these types of beads were a Roman product that testify to the active participation of the Roman world in eastern trade ( Lin 2006 : 152). However, Lin’s argument is based solely on the evidence of polyhedral beads found at the Oc Eo site along with Roman artifacts such as coins, seals, and glass. On the other hand, Louis Malleret (1962) argued that polyhedral beads were locally produced in emulation of Roman samples. evidence of local gold production has been found at the Oc Eo site in the form of a jewelry workshop including specialist crafts tools and fragments of gold (Higham 2004). ... Findings of imported goods originating from Persia, Gandhara, and Bactria in mainland China and at port sites in South China and Southeast Asia suggest that both overland and overseas routes were in use. ... These findings further support strong cultural and commercial connections between Southeast Asia and the Greco-Buddhist region and the argument that gold ornaments and possibly Greco-Roman artifacts reached Southeast Asia and South China via overland and overseas routes.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/211322771.pdf , page 313 / 320

This would suggest that the Roman dodecahedrons, or at least knowledge of their shape, might have travelled as far as the Mekong Delta, but that they were used as an interesting design inspiration for jewelry, their other uses being unknown or not applicable in the Southeast Asian context. (the Roman originals are far too large and heavy to be jewelry pendants).

Of course there is no reason to assume that people there didn't use the Platonic solids as design elements independently. But it's interesting that all of the examples of what they call 'polyhedral beads' are dodecahedrons with circular openings in the faces of the pentagons and knobs at the vertices, and that without specifically referencing the Roman ones, various authors have concluded that they are connected to Roman trade.

Alexander the Great extended his empire into India. So, the Greeks were there, and the Romans conquered the Greeks, so it stands to reason that there were Roman items in India. China isn't that far way. I would assume the "by sea" part was not a direct Roman enterprise, but part of a kind of Rube-Goldberg-machine trade apparatus in Roman goods. The Chinese were better sailors than the Portuguese in the Renaissance, so I would assume they were better in ancient times as well. Greek and Roman vessels usually tried to hug the coast, and only if they had to would they make a dash across open water, and then only in season. Paul's shipwreck ending up on Malta in Acts is a good introduction to Roman sailing practices (and those of the Greeks before them). The Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum to the Romans) is full of shipwrecks going way back. It makes you wonder what was worth the risk. (Maybe a lot of trade was relatively local--quicker and even safer to go 100 or so miles by sea where banditry was harder than on land.) Apparently well-off people of all ages are willing to pay high prices for the equivalent of a Lamborghini, and shipowners and merchants were willing to accommodate them. It's like Moby Dick--years at sea with lots of danger so you could sell oil for lighting and what not.

 

[malins]

I would assume the "by sea" part was not a direct Roman enterprise, but part of a kind of Rube-Goldberg-machine trade apparatus in Roman goods. The Chinese were better sailors than the Portuguese in the Renaissance,

Yes, as far as I understand all of the trade between Rome and East Asia was through middlemen ... and the big deal of Portuguese and other European navigation later on was of course, the newfound ability to cut those out and trade with the East directly.

Anyway, for another Roman topic...

this was posted by Puritan on Emily's discord last month, it's worth a listen for some forum members, who haven't already come across it - I hadn't...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of slavery in the Roman world, from its early conquests to the fall of the Western Empire. The system became so entrenched that no-one appeared to question it, following Aristotle's view that slavery was a natural state. Whole populations could be marched into slavery after military conquests, and the freedom that Roman citizens prized for themselves, even in poverty, was partly defined by how it contrasted with enslavement. Slaves could be killed or tortured with impunity, yet they could be given great responsibility and, once freed, use their contacts to earn fortunes. The relationship between slave and master informed early Christian ideas of how the faithful related to God, informing debate for centuries. With Neville Morley Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter Ulrike Roth Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh And Myles Lavan Senior lecturer in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews Producer: Simon Tillotson.

 

[old slave]

Yes, as far as I understand all of the trade between Rome and East Asia was through middlemen ... and the big deal of Portuguese and other European navigation later on was of course, the newfound ability to cut those out and trade with the East directly.

Anyway, for another Roman topic...

this was posted by Puritan on Emily's discord last month, it's worth a listen for some forum members, who haven't already come across it - I hadn't...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of slavery in the Roman world, from its early conquests to the fall of the Western Empire. The system became so entrenched that no-one appeared to question it, following Aristotle's view that slavery was a natural state. Whole populations could be marched into slavery after military conquests, and the freedom that Roman citizens prized for themselves, even in poverty, was partly defined by how it contrasted with enslavement. Slaves could be killed or tortured with impunity, yet they could be given great responsibility and, once freed, use their contacts to earn fortunes. The relationship between slave and master informed early Christian ideas of how the faithful related to God, informing debate for centuries. With Neville Morley Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter Ulrike Roth Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh And Myles Lavan Senior lecturer in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thanks, malins, I often listen to In Our Time but missed this one.

 

[Loxuru]

Yes, as far as I understand all of the trade between Rome and East Asia was through middlemen ... and the big deal of Portuguese and other European navigation later on was of course, the newfound ability to cut those out and trade with the East directly.

It seems that the Parthians took over the goods from the silk road traders from the east, and sold them to the Romans, and reverse.
Roman craftspeople untangled Chinese silk fabrics, rewove them, and sold them as 'Roman silk' back to the Chinese, through the Partian intermediates. This trading back resulted into lower prices for Chinese silk, and more profit for the Parthian intermediate traders. Such practices were only possible if the Parthians could avoid direct contact between Chinese merchants and Romans, otherwise, the former would discover that they were cheated with their own goods, and that Rome actually did not produce any kind of silk itself. One of the ways to avoid such contacts was by telling the Chinese that, for reaching Rome, they would have to sail a six months long voyage around a huge continent, for which they declined.

 

[malins]

Greek, not Roman...
further work on the Antikythera Mechanism - to watch the video you'll have to click through to Vimeo ( vimeo.com/518734183 )

"A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism"

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ve-used-bejewelled-rings-to-model-the-cosmos/

paper - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84310-w.pdf

In short, it's a working reimagination of the (rather incomplete) mechanism, fulfilling what's known about how some planetary cycles were represented, and using the constraint of finding a system with a limited number of gears that don't have too many teeth ... which they do by looking for shared prime factors to encode the periods of planetary motion.

A key observation was hints from the inscriptions on the mechanism, that different cycles than previously known from Greek astronomy were used. For instance the Greeks knew an inaccurate 8 year cycle and a more accurate 1151 year cycle to model Venus. The problem with 1151 is that it can't be represented by "x turns of a gear with y teeth" because it's a prime number. And an 1151-toothed gear is unfeasible mechanically, too big, and inelegant anyway as it could be used for only one part of the mechanism. But a very good approximation of the ratio used (a 720:1151) could be found in (289:462) - from the numbers on the inscription - and these are numbers that can be easily broken down into factors shared with the ratios for other planets. So you can use the same gears for several ratios and can work with mechanically feasible gears. They tried to reconstruct the unknown planetary mechanisms by using the most economic shared gears they could come up with.

Of course this doesn't mean they've "rebuilt the mechanism as it was" ... there is too much missing to know for sure, but it seems plausible by the approach to the astronomical periods, and explaining all the gears as well as the inscriptions we are aware of.

After building a working model with today's manufacturing, they also want to address the question whether it was feasible to construct with then-current methods, but of course one has to acknowledge that the Antikythera mechanism already pretty much redefines our idea of what the ancient Greeks could build...

 

[Hugin&Munin]

Very interesting, I am interested in things like that, but I didn't know this post yet.

 

[malins]

Very interesting, I am interested in things like that, but I didn't know this post yet.

I really recommend taking the time to watch the vimeo clip, the detailed explanations about the newly discovered inscriptions and the prime factorization are worth it.

Another interesting piece of old engineering ... a box with a combination lock that has 4 double concentric dials each of which has 16 positions, for a total of 16^8 or more than 4 billion combinations ... from early 13th century Isfahan.

The Seljuks - The David Collection

 

[Frank Petrexa]

Greek, not Roman...
further work on the Antikythera Mechanism - to watch the video you'll have to click through to Vimeo ( vimeo.com/518734183 )

"A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism"

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ve-used-bejewelled-rings-to-model-the-cosmos/

paper - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84310-w.pdf

In short, it's a working reimagination of the (rather incomplete) mechanism, fulfilling what's known about how some planetary cycles were represented, and using the constraint of finding a system with a limited number of gears that don't have too many teeth ... which they do by looking for shared prime factors to encode the periods of planetary motion.

A key observation was hints from the inscriptions on the mechanism, that different cycles than previously known from Greek astronomy were used. For instance the Greeks knew an inaccurate 8 year cycle and a more accurate 1151 year cycle to model Venus. The problem with 1151 is that it can't be represented by "x turns of a gear with y teeth" because it's a prime number. And an 1151-toothed gear is unfeasible mechanically, too big, and inelegant anyway as it could be used for only one part of the mechanism. But a very good approximation of the ratio used (a 720:1151) could be found in (289:462) - from the numbers on the inscription - and these are numbers that can be easily broken down into factors shared with the ratios for other planets. So you can use the same gears for several ratios and can work with mechanically feasible gears. They tried to reconstruct the unknown planetary mechanisms by using the most economic shared gears they could come up with.

Of course this doesn't mean they've "rebuilt the mechanism as it was" ... there is too much missing to know for sure, but it seems plausible by the approach to the astronomical periods, and explaining all the gears as well as the inscriptions we are aware of.

After building a working model with today's manufacturing, they also want to address the question whether it was feasible to construct with then-current methods, but of course one has to acknowledge that the Antikythera mechanism already pretty much redefines our idea of what the ancient Greeks could build...

There is a book called "A Portable Cosmos" from Oxford University Press by Alexander Jones. Two things are interesting to me about this. First, apparently Greek philosophy--particular Plato--liked perfection and abstract noodling, so elliptical orbits were out, and supposedly the Greek view was that the planets went in perfect circles around the sun, but to get the actual orbits it was necessary to have them rotate in mini circles around points along their paths. This made the whole thing a lot more complex. Secondly, the original is encrusted and frozen in place from being in salt water for so long, so the inner workings were only accessible recently with advances in X-ray tomography.
I will dump on Plato here (he's kind of a snotty type anyway) and say that in my view the number pi is an abstraction ("transcendental" in mathematical jargon) and like perfect circles does not exist in the real world. There is no "perfection", only a lot of little pieces subject to entropy and approximating an ideal physics.

 

[malins]

Two things are interesting to me about this. First, apparently Greek philosophy--particular Plato--liked perfection and abstract noodling, so elliptical orbits were out,

Indeed, there was that idea that "the celestial bodies should only move in perfect circles" but I think it's also important to consider that the ancients would not necessarily have had the same kind of view upon the planets as we learn from early on.

Obviously if you use epicycles, the resulting "actual motion of the physical planet" as you would see it, "when looking at the solar system from outer space above it" ... would not be a circle at all. That would violate the ideal. It's not clear that this bothered them though.

Ellipses (and hyperbola, parabola), defined as sections of a cone, were of course well known to the Greeks and that knowledge was passed on to the Arabs. And in fact Apollonius of Perga, who introduced the names for them that we still use today, also worked on the idea of epicycles and eccentric orbits! But it seems neither Greeks nor Arabs came up with the idea of ellipses to calculate planetary motion. My knowledge of other mathematical histories (China, India etc.) is practically zero so I have no idea if anyone there ever considered it independently.

Even though the original Copernican model was, in terms of predictions, no better than the geocentric Ptolemaic one (because it still used circular orbits) I think that step was a necessary condition, to get to the elliptical orbits.

Because once you've got the heliocentric model, the "big" problems, like the apparent retrograde motion of planets against the background of the stars, go away by themselves, and you can strive to explain the remaining deviations by squashing and massaging the circles into different shapes.

In a geocentric system though, even putting a planet on an ellipse instead of a circle, wouldn't explain why it sometimes seems to move backwards in the sky. It would explain why it slows down but it would never go backward. So you would still need some additional gadget in the theory.

 

[Frank Petrexa]

I guess I wouldn't want to be the one who had to keep these things above water. (I would park them on a sandbar or something). But engineering is always a difficult art. The crews of the Mississippi riverboats of Mark Twain's youth had to repeatedly take soundings to keep them off the sandbars hidden in the river, and the boilers would blow up on occasion. Even Polynesian navigators, the best in the business, aren't really suited for life on the water, it seems.

 

[Praefectus Praetorio]

The 15th of March, the "Ides" of March as the Romans would refer to it, is well remembered for the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar. While many historians today tend to dismiss the 'great man" or the "dramatic turning point," ways to view history, it is most difficult to deny that the action of those conspirators, leading to another civil war and the rise to power of Octavian (later Augustus) who established the Principate (the source of our word "Prince") clearly made a significant impact on the next five hundreds years of European history (if not all the way to today.)

Ave Caesar! Hail Caesar!

 

[Loxuru]

Ave Caesar! Hail Caesar!

I've come to bury Caesar, not to praise him!

Caesar was one of the greatest war criminals in history.
One may think the notion of 'war criminal' did not exist at the time? It did!
Rome's official policy was to only wage wars for its own defence - obviously it kept the hence conquered territories under control.
Inflicted casualties to enemies had to be proportional.
This was monitored by the Senate.

When invading Gaul, Ceasar broke both rules. He afterwards got indicted for war crimes by the Senate.
He got away with it!

 

[Praefectus Praetorio]

For those in Germany (especially near Trier) The still extant Roman buildings.

 

[Apostate]

For those in Germany (especially near Trier) The still extant Roman buildings.

Cool. Massively cool.