Pompeii – the buried city
One witness wrote, "The dust “poured across the land” like a flood, and shrouded the city in a darkness…like the black of closed and unlighted rooms." The city was abandoned for 2000 years and almost as many people had died. The city was not even known to have existed until 1748 when a group of explorers rediscovered the site, they were surprised to find that–underneath a thick layer of dust and debris–Pompeii was mostly intact.
One witness wrote, "The dust “poured across the land” like a flood, and shrouded the city in a darkness…like the black of closed and unlighted rooms." The city was abandoned for 2000 years and almost as many people had died. The city was not even known to have existed until 1748 when a group of explorers rediscovered the site, they were surprised to find that–underneath a thick layer of dust and debris–Pompeii was mostly intact.
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| The city of Pompeii was an ancient Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei . Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area, was mostly destroyed and buried under 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft.) of thick carpet of volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. |
History
In order to study the 79 AD volcanic event, archaeological digs have
been made at the site extending up to the street level. The city had suffered from
other seismic events before the eruption .This has been suggested from layers
of jumbled sediment which have been exposed as a consequence of deeper digs in
older parts of Pompeii and due to core samples of nearby drillings. In fact, three
sheets of sediment have been found on top of the lava that lies below the city
and, mixed in with the sediment, bits of animal bone, pottery shards and
plants have been found. As a result of Carbon dating, the oldest of these
layers have been determined to be from the 8th–6th centuries BC (around the
time the city was founded). The other two strata were laid in the 4th century
BC and 2nd century BC and are separated either by well-developed soil layers or
Roman pavement It is theorized that these layers of jumbled sediment were
created by large landslides, perhaps triggered by extended rainfall.
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| A paved street. The blocks in the road allowed pedestrians to cross the street without having to step onto the road itself which doubled up as Pompeii's drainage and sewage disposal system. The spaces between the blocks allowed vehicles to pass along the road. |
Pompeii had already been used as a safe
port by Greek and Phoenician sailors. It was founded around the
6th–7th century BC by the Osci or Oscans, a people of central Italy. It was built on
what was an important crossroad between Cumae, Nola and Stabiae. Pompeii
was also captured by the Etruscans, shown by the presence of Etruscan
inscriptions and a 6th-century BC necropolis in recent excavations.
However, in the 5th century BC, the
Samnites conquered
it (and all the other towns of Campania) and the new rulers imposed their
architecture and enlarged the town.
After the Samnite Wars (4th
century BC), Pompeii was forced to accept the status of socium of Rome . It however,
maintained linguistic and administrative autonomy.In the 4th century BC, it was
fortified. During the Second Punic War, Pompeii remained faithful to Rome.
Geography
The ruins of Pompeii are located near the modern suburban town of
Pompei (nowadays written with one 'i'). It stands on a spur formed by a
lava flow to the north of the mouth of the Sarno river.
In order to reveal the agricultural staples in Pompeii’s economy
prior to 79 A.D excavations of garden sites and urban domains were carried out
by modern archaeologists. It was concluded that Pompeii was fortunate to have a
fruitful, fertile region of soil for harvesting a variety of crops. The soils
surrounding Mount Vesuvius even preceding its eruption have been revealed to
have good water-holding capabilities, implying access to productive
agriculture. The Tyrrhenian
Life in
Pompeii
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| The Forum with Vesuvius in the distance |
The region around Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples became a
tourist spot due to its climate, ever since the ancient Greeks settled in the
area in the 8th century B.C. By the turn of the first century A.D., the town of
Pompeii, located about five miles from the mountain, was a flourishing resort
for Rome’s most distinguished citizens. The paved streets were lined with elegant
houses and elaborate villas. Tourists, townspeople and slaves bustled in and
out of small factories and artisans’ shops, taverns and cafes, and brothels and
bathhouses. People gathered in the 20,000-seat arena and lounged in the
open-air squares and marketplaces. On the eve of that fateful eruption in 79
A.D., it was estimated that there were about 20,000 people living in Pompeii
and the surrounding region.
Mount Vesuvius
Did You Know?
Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, but it is still one of the
most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Experts believe that another Plinean
eruption is due any day--an almost unfathomable catastrophe, since almost 3
million people live within 20 miles of the volcano’s crater.
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| Mount Vesuvius |
The formation of The Vesuvius volcano was not an overnight
result. In fact, it is said that the mountain is hundreds of thousands of years
old and had been erupting for generations. For instance, in about 1780 B.C., an unusually violent eruption (known today as
the “Avellino eruption”) shot millions of tons of superheated lava, ash and rocks
about 22 miles into the sky which destroyed almost every village, house and
farm within 15 miles of the mountain. But it was easy to overlook the
mountain’s bad temper in such a pleasant, sunny spot. Even after a massive
earthquake struck the Campania region in 63 A.D.–a quake that, scientists now say,
was a warning of the impending disaster–people still flocked to the shores of
the Bay of Naples and with every passing year Pompeii grew more and more crowded.
79 A.D. - Eruption of Vesuvius
In August 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius became active
and erupted again, sixteen years after the massive warning earthquake. This eruption
sent a plume of ashes, pumice and other rocks, along with scorching-hot
volcanic gases so high into the sky that people could see it for hundreds of
miles around. (The writer Pliny the Younger, who watched the eruption from
across the bay, compared this “cloud of unusual size and appearance” to a pine
tree that “rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into
branches”; today, geologists refer to this type of volcano as a “Plinean
eruption.”)
please do read about what Plinean saw on this following link:
| Mount Vesuvius erupting |
Pompeii was already buried under millions
of tons of volcanic ash by the time the Vesuvius eruption sputtered to an end
the next day. About 2,000 people were dead. Some came back to town in search of
their lost loved ones and belongings, only to find out that there was no town left
to search for. It was as if Pompeii had never existed. Pompeii, along with the
smaller neighboring towns of Stabiae and Herculaneum, was abandoned for centuries.
Rediscovering
Pompeii
Pompeii remained mostly untouched until 1748, even
though Herculaneum was already rediscovered in 1738 by workmen digging for the
foundations of a summer palace for the King of Naples. This historical buried
city was rediscovered by chance, when a group of explorers looking for ancient artifacts
arrived in Campania and began to dig. They found that the ashes had acted as a marvelous
preservative due
to lack of air and moisture which generally lay a major part in the process of
degradation : Underneath all that dust, Pompeii was completely intact, same as it had
been 2,000 years ago with its buildings and everyday objects and household goods littering the streets. The only difference was that now we could see the skeletons frozen right
where they’d fallen instead of people.
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| "Garden of the Fugitives". Plaster casts of victims still in situ; many casts are in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. |
Uncovered jars of preserved fruit and loaves of
bread were also discovered by archeologists which provided us with an
extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city. When Giuseppe fiorelli took
charge of the excavations in 1863 occasional voids in the ash layer had been
found that contained human remains. It was Fiorelli who realized these were
spaces left by the decomposed bodies and so devised the technique of injecting
plaster into them to recreate the forms of Vesuvius's victims. This
technique is still in use today, with a clear resin now used instead of
plaster because it is more durable, and does not destroy the bones, allowing
further analysis. So during the excavation, plaster was used to fill in
the voids between the ash layers that once held human bodies. This allowed one
to see the exact position the person was in when he or she died.
Tourism
Tourism
For over last 250 years Pompeii has been a popular tourist destination. By 2008, its tourist stats reached up to as
high as 2.6 million visitors per year, which made it one of the most popular
tourist sites in Italy. It is part of a larger Vesuvius National Park and in 1997 was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Pompeii – The Movie
Pompeii is
a 2014 German-Canadian historical disaster film produced and directed by
Paul W. S. Anderson in which a slave turned gladiator finds himself in a
race against time to save his true love as mount Vesuvius erupts.
Documentary
Sources
1) Pompeii online.net
2) Eyewitness to history
3) History.com
4) You tube.com
5) Wikipedia
6) Google images
7) and other links
7) and other links
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