Ancient Cities

Pompeii and Herculaneum were both well established cities by 79 AD. They were both near to the sea and had strong shipping routes and money inflow. There was an abundance of nobles who came to the cities to watch the arena fights and bet on who would win. The slaves were probably less thrilled about the fights, since they were the ones fighting each other and fierce half starved, tortured animals. Others may have been thrilled at the chance of freedom; won by battling a particularly well known and feared opponent.

In 79 AD (or 832 AUC to the Romans) every Roman city was unique but still very Roman, so they all had similar architecture, decor, and social hierarchy. Both cities had sewer systems running beneath the sidewalks. Similar systems enabled them to wash the streets clean of all the filth that inevitably wound up there. Herculaneum was a luxury seaside resort for the upper class, complete with private baths in most homes. It had only the finest types of tradesmen especially those most useful to the nobles. Some of the tradespeople were doubtlessly there to repair the supply of running water that was a must have in all refined households. Pompeii, on the other hand, was more of a trading and traveler destination with a little less money but a bigger population. Instead of running water in most of the homes, Pompeii had numerous large public bath houses that were very inexpensive. Pompeii also had a huge amphitheater compared to Herculaneum’s two smaller, Greek style, semicircle theaters.

Pompeii was the first to see the impact of the huge volcanic eruption. It was covered in suffocating layers of ash, coating everything and making roofs and some walls collapse with its weight. By the end, Pompeii was under over six meters of ash, approximately nineteen feet. Thousands of people didn’t evacuate in time and were also trapped in ash. Two thousand years later almost everything organic had decomposed. With the right environment and centuries of rainfall compacting and passing through the ash, the organic matter had been washed away leaving nothing but bone fragments and voids in the ash where it used to be. Scientists found some of these voids and filled them with plaster to figure out what they were: horses, dogs, people and other once breathing organisms were all found in the faces of the molds. These plaster molds are on display in Pompeii and the museum in Naples giving an eerily close look at those who succumbed to the eruption. Herculaneum had a troubling time as well. When the ash rose up miles into the air everyone tried to make an escape through the harbor. Unfortunately not all made it out. Hours after the ash had devastated Pompeii, a lava hot muddy slurry flowed from the west side of Vesuvius towards Herculaneum. Everything, including people who had not escaped into the sea, ended up buried under 25 meters of molten rocks, mud, and debris.

Both cities suffered severe structural damage but in Pompeii some of the smaller items and even some wood survived because the ash didn’t carry the same damaging heat. The fresco collection is particularly impressive in Pompeii and well preserved. In an effort to continue to preserve them, most were cut out of the walls and moved to the museum in Naples. In Naples we saw rooms and rooms full of colorful art that was once part of the walls in Pompeii.

In Herculaneum it was much hotter, burning most of the organic materials: wood, cloth, food, humans, animals, and papyrus. There are a few exceptions though, and perhaps most importantly a large collection of charcoaled papyrus scrolls were uncovered in the nineteenth century. They were burned, unreadable and charred in their rolled shape. But recently, with cutting edge technology, they are more useful than they first appeared. They came to be in that condition when Herculaneum was covered and they were slowly burned turning the papyrus into charcoal with a consistency of extra crispy bacon. Archeologists are using a type of MRI to see through the outer layers to the barely intact indents and ink still on the scrolls. It took painstaking precision to dig the rock out while minimizing the damage to ancient artifacts. Visiting the ancient cities that were destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius was a enlightening experience.