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Greeks are usually credited with being the first to discover the regular polyhedra. The earliest known written records of these shapes come from Greek authors, who also gave the first known mathematical description of them.
Across the [[Mediterranean Sea]] was another civilisation, the [[Etruscan civilization|Etruscan]]. There is a possibility that these people predated the Greeks in their awareness of at least some of the regular polyhedra, as evidenced by the discovery near [[Padua]] (in Northern [[Italy]]) in the late [[1800s]] of a dodecahedron made of [[soapstone]], and dating back more than 2,500 years (Lindemann, 1987). It may be argued, however, that the construction of this form was inspired by the pyritohedron (mentioned elsewhere in this article), as pyrite minerals are relatively abundant in that part of the world. ..
Even pre-dating the Etruscans however, come discoveries from [[Scotland]] of stones carved in shapes showing the symmetry of all five of the platonic solids. These stones, dating back to perhaps 4,000 years, show not only the form of each of the five platonic solids, but also the relations of duality amongst them (that is, that the centres of the faces of the cube gives the vertices of an octahedron, and so on). Examples of these stones are on display in the [http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ash/guide/t-text/room29.html John Evans room] of the [[Ashmolean Museum]] at [[Oxford University]]. It is impossible to know why these objects were made, or how the sculptor gained the inspiration for them.
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