Roman Army Knife (201-300 AD); has a spoon, knife, fork, spike, spatula and pick allowing the user to even clean between their teeth after eating. It was part of the equipment of Roman legions. This folding eating gadget has a three-pronged fork, a spoon,a spatula,a pick, a spike and an iron knife that has eroded away. There is a hinge to allow each item to be folded out when it was needed, or folded away for ease of transporting it. The spike might of helped in extracting the meat from snails, and the spatula in scraping sauce out of narrow-necked bottles. Some have even suggested the pick with the tiny spoon on the end could have been used to remove earwax.

Archaeology Story Vien123 · January 17, 2024

And there you were tinking that the Leatherman or Swiss Army Knife in your pocket was a relatively modern invention. Not so – the Romans had multi-tool gadgets too.

Case in point: the “compound utensils” held in the collection of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Musuem,

snaps of which were recently posted on the institution’s website and subsequently spotted by Neatorama.

Manufactured from iron and silver, the multiplex knife contains a blade of fearsome pointiness, a fork, a spatula, a spike and a pick.

The utensil was actually described way back in 1988 by archaeologist David Sherlock in his seminal work A combination Roman eating implement, published in the Antiquaries Journal, [xlix, 310-311] and which harks back to Sherlock’s earlier opus Roman folding spoons [Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 62, 1976, p.128-129].

The gadget was manufactured between AD201 and AD300. ®

Vien123