1,700-Year-Old Striped Socks and 11 More Everyday Things From Ancient History

This twenty-sided die at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is carved from serpentinite, with a Greek letter on each of its faces. It came from Egypt and dates from somewhere between the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD.

Anyone who has played a tabletop role-playing game will know the shape at once. What it was used for is less certain: the Met’s note on a matching die says nothing specific about the use of these polyhedra is preserved, and points to fortune-telling as a likelier purpose than games.

A silver folding tool at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge dates from about AD 201–300. Its parts fold out like a modern pocketknife: a spoon, a three-pronged fork, a spatula, a pick, a spike and a knife.

The museum’s record suggests that its complexity and the fact that it is made of silver mark it as a luxury item, perhaps a useful gadget for a wealthy traveler. The museum bought it in 1990, so where it was found is not recorded. The museum’s own record calls it a Roman “Swiss Army Knife.”

The British Museum has a child’s sock from Roman Egypt, made in six or seven colors of wool with a single-needle looping technique. The big toe is separate from the other four, the way you would need it for a sandal. Radiocarbon dating puts it in the 3rd or 4th century AD.

It was found at Antinoupolis, in Middle Egypt, in 1913–14, and Smithsonian Magazine noted that it was fished out of an ancient rubbish heap. The photo shows a similar pair of split-toe socks from the same era, now at the V&A in London.

These snow goggles at the Met were carved from walrus ivory by the Thule people, the ancestors of today’s Inuit, sometime between about 800 and 1200. According to the museum record, they shielded the eyes from windblown ice and from the glare of the sun on Arctic snow.

The two narrow slits let in only a sliver of light, the same job a pair of sunglasses does today. Live Science wrote about the goggles in 2025.

Around AD 97–103, a woman named Claudia Severa wrote to her friend Lepidina at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s Wall in what is now northern England. The wooden tablet, now in the British Museum, invites her to a birthday celebration. In the museum’s translation, it reads: “I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us.”

Roman Inscriptions of Britain calls parts of the letter almost certainly the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman.

This clay tablet at the British Museum is a letter from a man named Nanni to a merchant named Ea-nasir, written around 1750 BC in the city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. Nanni complains that the wrong grade of copper ore was delivered to him.

It was excavated at Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley’s team, and Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest written customer complaint.

Thousands of leather shoes have been found at Vindolanda, the Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall, among them children’s shoes with iron hobnails and a child’s openwork sandal that looks like a woven summer shoe from a modern store. A label from a 2019 exhibition in Florence dated these children’s shoes to about AD 200–213.

A study by Elizabeth Greene at Western University found that shoes from high-status households at the fort were much nicer than the basic shoes found in the barracks. The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto is showing Vindolanda shoes until 2027.

This terracotta mouse at the Met was made in Sicily in the middle of the 5th century BC. The museum notes that vessels like it may have been used as feeding bottles for babies.

A 2019 study of prehistoric feeding vessels from central Europe found that some of them were shaped like animals, and researchers suspect it was to make the children smile.

This iron key on a ring at the Met was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, in 1896–97, and dates from the Roman period, sometime between 30 BC and AD 364. The key is part of the ring, so it could be worn on a finger.

The V&A suggests that key rings may have been used because Roman clothing did not generally have pockets, and that such keys opened small boxes or caskets of personal possessions.

This pair of child’s sandals at the Met was made of leather in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt, in the 4th century. Each sandal is just over 6 inches long.

Apart from the leather, they would not look out of place on a beach today.

This terracotta pig at the Met is a Roman rattle from the 2nd century AD, decorated on its back with small chunks of colored glass.

Other ancient toy rattles survive too: the Penn Museum has a pottery toy rattle from Pompeii, shaped like a child riding an animal.

This clay tablet in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian Collection holds culinary recipes from the Old Babylonian period.

Researchers who cooked from tablets like this one in 2019 told NPR that three of them date back to the Old Babylonian period, no later than 1730 BC, which makes them the oldest known recipes in the world.