Geometrical balls

All this prompted by an episode of 'Digging for Britain' which came to me over lunch at Cappadocia, of which more in due course. Starting with the ball snapped above, dug up by the people of Norton Disney, as recorded at reference 1. About the size of a grapefruit and dating from around the middle of the Romans time here.

It seems that more than a hundred of these balls, known as Roman Dodecahedrons, mostly not as large or as in such condition as this one, have been found in north western Europe, as mapped above. A selection of the better ones is snapped below.

Archaeologists puzzle about what these expensive objects might have been for, coming up, perhaps in their cups, with some quite bizarre suggestions, including one about knitting. I asked Google's Bard and, for once, he was quite restrained, confining himself pretty much to the facts as I then knew them. He did not invent some plausible story about them.

There may be a link to some rather smaller, golden balls found in what used to be called Indo China, possibly linked to the roughly contemporary Óc Eo of references 2, 3 and 4.

While I associate to the much older stone balls of Scotland which we came across at the recent Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum and for which see references 5 and 6. A rather elaborate specimen, lifted from reference 6, is included above.

My own thought is that all these balls do not have to be for anything, any more than one would like to say what the 'Hay Wain' of reference 7 was for, what it was used for. Can we not allow that rich and powerful men in their leisure time liked to look at, handle and pass these balls around the camp fire, fascinated by the geometry of them, even if they could not describe that geometry in the language available to us now?

Perhaps not that different to the fascination with cut gem stones. But they are much smaller, are not as handy and I have no idea whether they were around at this time. Although I believe that the Vikings were keen on the gold and jewellery ornaments which they looted from the fleshpots of what had been Roman Europe. Perhaps they passed them around the camp fire too. With the added attraction of glitter.

PS: I read that at one time there was a lot of Hindu influence in Indo China. Perhaps President Modi, when he tires of building giant temple complexes, will cast his eyes there.

References

Reference 1: https://nortondisneyhag.org/.

Reference 2: Archaeology of the Oc Eo Culture (Southern Vietnam): Exploration, Research, and Achievements - Nguyen Hoang Bach Linh - 2023.

Reference 3: Oc Eo culture: A case study of Oc Eo artefacts in Southern Vietnam - Nguyen Thi Huynh Phuong - 2016.

Reference 4: https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6572/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/to-stones.html.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/constable.html.