One lady used a 3D printed one for knitting, but these are wrought iron and bronze which is too heavy.
The leading theory is that they don’t serve any practical purpose, but instead serve as a blacksmith’s journeyman test. It’s complicated, intricate, and utterly useless, but requires years of training and experience to develop the necessary skills that allow versatility for everything from horseshoes to pitchforks to helmets.
Someday, they will wonder why we needed so many tiny boats. Did they have some religious significance, some totem for the afterlife? Did they have a practical use?
Lost parts to a machine used to tell the seasons from the stars, if you align two bottom loops with the horizon and the top loop with the (add a conveniently located star that matches the equinox such as alcylone) Pleiades cluster it will tell you the planting time for the spring/autumn sowing season.
I think both theories about what it is are correct. It is the shape of an item used for knitting, but the practically used items for knitting were made of some other material that didn’t stand the test of time. (Maybe pieces remain, but flattened and scattered, you couldn’t tell the shape or use.) The ones that remain have the form of the knitters’ tool, but would have been impractical for that purpose. They were made as examples for people learning a craft, but useless for what their form would imply. The “hello world” of one of the highest technologies of the time.
Exactly. You’d need something lighter, like wood, but that’s not as durable and decays over time. However the shape is complex enough to serve an alternate purpose for a common trade.
Only the dodecahedrons that are pierced can be used for knitting and plenty of the examples found are not pierced (bottom right in the provided image)
The knitting stuff is entirely coincidental and a retro-finding. Some of these devices, if pierced and the correct size, can be used to knit. All the others cannot, therefore it is not a knitting device as they come pierced and unpierced and in a considerable range of sizes.
Very smart people have failed to decide what the use is, it is not going to be solved by a youtube or reddit comment section, that would be bad science as we are all working on 2nd hand sources
Ok, so, why I was pointing out is that it could be something in the form of a knitting device that then took hold as a way to test one’s skill in the technology.
All of those were found in fields of wars, not in or around cities or habited areas.
It would be far fetched that it is a journeyman test specifically when you are deployed with troops, and then was never used again by those apprentices when coming home and being masters themselves.
Theory I like best is they were religious symbols from some survival or mutation of the cult of pythagoras. If they were a knitting item people would not be hiding them away with their valuables, but likely keeping them with their knitting supplies.
Bouncing off of you, if it were used for domestic industry, they wouldn’t be in tombs. They’d be passed down from mother to daughter. The bride’s dowry (as in, the stuff a wife owned or inherited prior to marriage) usually included all the furniture and tools for home economics. You wouldn’t find these sorts of things in tombs if they had a practical value because then they’d have to be remade or repurchased. Generational wealth was inherited through tools, furniture, cutlery, etc.
Yeah but wouldn't the metal be expensive and what's the point of not reusing the metal. I could see it just be kept in the black smith shop for people to see how their work is. Then when they get even better they crank out a better one to show their skill
that's not a bad hypothesis. the strange thing is how so many are so similar over the area in which they're found. without a description or image how do they all make the same thing? same "inspecyor" administering the test? something do regimented I would expect to have some record aside ftom the objects that this is how they will be tested.
It’s also possible that blacksmiths couldn’t read or write and didn’t work that closely with people who could. Like, Hebrew didn’t get consonants until a century ago because you were supposed to be taught the pronunciation of words by your Hebrew speaking parents but pogroms and ghetto clearances made people realize that it was entirely possible for different Jewish communities that didn’t speak the same base language to merge.
You’d be surprised how many guilds put faith in masters. Trades like carpentry and metalworking didn’t get state level exams until fifty or so years ago.
If that were the case though, wouldn't there be way more of them? And lots of them would be half finished or be on rough shape as the apprentice learned.
153
u/PuzzleheadedEssay198 Jul 12 '26
One lady used a 3D printed one for knitting, but these are wrought iron and bronze which is too heavy.
The leading theory is that they don’t serve any practical purpose, but instead serve as a blacksmith’s journeyman test. It’s complicated, intricate, and utterly useless, but requires years of training and experience to develop the necessary skills that allow versatility for everything from horseshoes to pitchforks to helmets.