"Everyone knows what a horse is"

It could also have been used for a game

I've actually seen an old lady knit gloves with one as well.

Nope.

I always wondered how they made those

A piggy bank even?

Except there's heaps of them

or something used in “fertility rituals”

People back then loved their religious calendars. That's all they ever talked about. Whole books could be written about them.

But instead of books to write about them, they documented their love of religious calendar artifacts, with more calendar artifacts.

So it's a sex toy, got it.

I always loved David Macauley take on this. He wrote a book as if people 2000 years ago found a motel and he presumed the “sanitized for your protection” banding and toilet seats would have been seen as ceremonial wear.

https://www.byanyothernerd.com/2020/04/stranger-days-39-mysteries-of-motel.html?m=1

Underrated joke

What an utterly ridiculous notion. Obviously it's a magical battery that, once charged, can be inserted into an ancient titan robot to power it back up.

Knitting is a medieval development that originated around Egypt in probably 1000-1100 CE (AD). There is no evidence of two needle knitting before then.

Romans used sprang, weaving and needlebinding techniques. They did not knit. Some needlebound artifacts can resemble knitting - particularly those in the Coptic stitch. They are still produced using the thumb and needle method of needlebinding and are structurally different.

The type of knitting that YouTube grandma did on the dodecahedron - spool knitting/French knitting - is an even later development - early modern period - 1400-1500s.

As a spool knitter, the dodecahedron makes very little sense. The spacing of the pegs - not the spacing of the holes - is what determines the size of the created tube. Every face of the dodecahedron would create the same size tube - which means you’ve just got extra random pointless shit digging into your hands. Google and compare to a modern spool knitter.

The idea of making a doohickey for fingered gloves, which you would then need to sew on anyway (every knitters least favorite thing to do) - it’s silly.

Here are some 4th/5th century socks - produced via needlebinding.

Here is the earliest known example of true knitting. 1000 at earliest.

You mentioned that not all socks would survive - that is true, but often textile patterns can be recovered through indentions in other material.

People say this every time, and it’s still not true, because the Romans didn’t knit. Knitting is a technology and it hadn’t made it to Rome at the time these were made.

Also, some were solid and unsuitable for knitting. And they were found with giant piles of money, which is a weird place to keep your domestic tools.

knitting what? the ones that have been recovered were way too big to make sense for that purpose

Are you asserting that an ornament can't be categorized as a religious artifact? Cuz if so, I (or you) have some explaining to do.

Also, I think people have found them on people's bodies and in their purses, indicating it's something they might carry around regularly.

That is not an uncommon guess, but the argument against it is that these took some sophistication to make. This isn't some disposable gewgaw. These were made with relatively tight tolerances and exhibited the best metalworking fabrication of the age. One theory I've seen seriously floated was that they were made as a demonstration of metal working competency, the equivalent of a benchy in 3D printing.

No, no you don't. Everything that isn't fully functional and necessary for life is a ritual object! And also some of the the other things to! It's all ritual! It's ritual all the way down, baby!

Why wouldn't you use a simple flat metal bar, or even a ring shaped bar, with standard holes in it?

The educated, literate people probably wouldn’t bother to write down the exact details of a low class gambling game, when literacy is rare and scrolls/books are expensive.

Interesting enough, the Roman Emperor Claudius, who was an enthusiastic dicer, wrote a book on gaming/gambling. It's been lost to time, unfortunately.

Literacy is a funny question in regards to the Roman Empire, as is the price of scrolls/books. There's limited evidence that scrolls and books were actually cheaper in the Roman Empire than in the 15th century AD, just before and in-the-early-days-of moveable type, and that urban literacy was fairly widespread. The big problem is that the vast majority of ancient writing simply has not survived the ages.

I'm not well-informed about the dodecahedrons or the theories surrounding them, but I'm inclined to find your explanation, while interesting, probably a bit too complex. Especially considering that coins were often slightly irregular in shape, as the mass-produced neat, perfect circles that we're used to are a result of modern milled coinage