Hella unlikely they were used to knit gloves
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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It's a rope junction, with the different holes for different knots and rope bundles, with the spokes serving as rope bend/end points. Presumably it would get weeded out as the places where it was employed either stopped making use of them, like perhaps the weather fabric roof shielding of the coliseum, or ended up using more specialized means, like for sailing.
These things are generally found with coins. They would have been shockingly expensive to use as a rope junction when there are other, cheaper ways to do that. They would have been difficult to produce, especially in any great quantity, hell it would be hard today. There's also at least one icosahedron floating around somewhere that's very similar but with fewer openings
It would make sense that if there were better alternatives that the other, cheaper ways to do that would win out. It's metal working, you are talking as if the gladius wasn't common in ancient Rome.
It's just intuitive for working with rope, given the shape of the spokes and the holes, in a way where it would be treated as a junction. The ones that do have the holes have different sizes, giving a glimpse of additional features being incorporated into the tool and hinting at what it might have been used for.
It's called a Roman dodecahedron, except not so much for the version of it that has no holes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron#/media/File:2018_Rheinisches_Landesmuseum_Bonn,_Dodekaeder_&_Ikosaeder.jpg
What I'm beginning to think is that it was designed to spin (hence the circular groves on the sides) and join smaller ropes into those of bigger sizes, with different holes adapted to different templates of sizes. The version with no holes was designed to work with less ropes and didn't need it or just simply didn't incorporate it yet. Still placing my bets on a rope rigging junction.
That it was found in places with lots of coin makes sense, places like the Roman coliseum used a shitload of rope, from the rope that would be used to hold its canopy to those that would handle the weights, counterweights, and mechanisms of its lower levels, and those places would move a lot of money. But maybe it has the more utilitarian purpose being able to create rope bundles of different sizes on demand.
Darned if I know, I'm not an antropologist, just saying what I would assume intuitively, lol
I was going to say, this looks very similar to knitting circles that are available today (I use them all the time). Those knobs and holes make me immediately think that this is used for fibre or knot work of some kind. Rope seems understandable, but I can't tell from the picture if that is made from metal or clay. No issues if it was metal, but I would figure that clay wouldn't hold up to the rope pulling and pressing against it in any intensive application.
I am curious as to why OP decided this is unlikely to be used for "knitting gloves". The Romans may not have practiced knitting as we understand it now since that came about in the middle ages, but knitting isn't the only form of knotwork that can produce cloth.
You can use a replica to knit gloves, and that's where the theory originated, but real ones are too big to make gloves for humans.
My confusion is more "why gloves in particular?" Couldn't this have been used for cloth making in general?
I don't know what this item is called, so I can't look up its size. Is it too big to be used for cloth making at all?
No one knows what they were called, so they're just Roman Dodecahedron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
Cheers, thanks for the link!