Pompeii: Lost and Found

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in August of 79 AD, Pompeii was buried in volcanic ash and rock. As time passed, Pompeii was forgotten. Learn more about the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii -- as well as the city's rediscovery -- in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Doughtie, and Atlanta has
been besieged by rain for what feels like something around

(00:21):
forty five days, but it's really only been two weeks.
Two weeks long enough for me, and everything is flooding,
but you know it's worse than flooding, Sarah, I think
I have an idea being rained on with volcanic ash,
which is what happened to Pompeii in a D. Seventy nine.
Pompeii was founded by the Oskins in the sixth or
seventh century BC. We're not sure. It was near Naples

(00:44):
in the region of Campania. Was very fertile, lots of
olives and grain and sheep, Sarah and I are very
fond of sheep. And it was Greek for a while,
but then Rome took over in about to nine b C.
And they rebelled in ninety b C. But Celli beat
them and they became part of a from An empire.
But by seventy nine a d. Pompeii is this bustling

(01:05):
cosmopolitan port city. It has extremely fertile soil, which unfortunately
that's because it's built under a freaking volcano. But it's
good for agriculture while it lasts, you know. Um. They
have an aqueduct that supplies fountains in the city and
homes of the wool industry because of the sheep. Everything's

(01:25):
going really nice. They have vineyards. UM. I like this
note a lot plenty of the elder said that Pompeian
wine gives you a really bad hangover, so so none
of that. Take it easy on the Pompeian wine. Um.
But there's start to be some warning signs around this
time that Mount Vesuvius Uh is starting to be active again.

(01:48):
There's a huge earthquake seventeen years earlier, and actually at
the time of the volcano explosion, the town hasn't even
quite recovered from this earth now they're still rebuilding. And
the year of the volcano there's small earth a small earthquake,
and the wells go dry, and the animals are reported
to be acting strangely, and the people notice strange waves

(02:11):
in the ocean that they're not used to seeing. So
there's an undercurrent of something that's not quite right going on.
So This brings us to August twenty four in the
year seventy nine, which is when everything starts to go down,
and we know a lot about what happened on the
day of the explosion because of an account written by
Plenty of the younger to his friends some years afterwards.

(02:31):
Um He wrote that he saw a cloud of unusual
size and appearance, which reminded him of a pine tree,
for it rose to a great height on a sort
of trunk and then split off into branches. And what
he was describing actually is later termed a plenty In eruption,
which is a huge column of gas and ash that's

(02:52):
shot up into the stratosphere by an enormous volcano eruption,
such as this one with Mount Vesuvius. So August, a
column of smoke appears above the mountain and people are
uneasy because ash and pumice starts falling on Pompeii, and
a bunch of people get the hell out of town.

(03:13):
The people try to try to make it that's not
to sail off them survive, but um, the people who
are taking this as a bad sign ash and pumice
falling leave. The column grows to eighteen miles high and
blocks out the sun. And they're neighboring cities around here
too that are noticing. And it's not just Pompeii, even
though that's what you usually hear about. We've also got

(03:34):
Herculaneum and but the others. Uh, I don't know if
I'm pronouncing this. One writes to Bay to Bay and
um tour in Unciata, among other little tiny towns. So
there there's a lot going on in this immediate area.
So the ash and pemmis are still falling, and they're
falling deeper. People are watching this column grow and more

(03:57):
people start grabbing your jewelry and their belongings and trying
to flee the city. But at this point it's too late, yeah,
because by nightfall, the shower of ash and pomis has
gotten denser and deadlier, and it covers the city nine
ft deep, which collapses roofs and um. Some of the
the bodies later discovered or found sheltering under a stairwell

(04:20):
that's collapsed on them. And so a lot of people
are dying in their homes by now, or if they're
out in the street dying just suffocated by the ash
or burned by it. You can imagine it would be
hard to breathe in a bunch of ash and pumice.
And then the worst part is still yet to come
on the morning of which is when the column collapses

(04:41):
and a surge of incredibly hot gas and rocks hits herculaneum. First,
people are killed instantly from the thermal shock. It's a
thousand degree heat. It melts the skin and the muscles
from their bodies and it's just skeleton's left. They didn't
even have time to react. There are no facial expressions
or anything. Everybody's just buried. Yeah. An earlier eruption amount

(05:03):
Vesuvius and Avelino about two thousand years before this one,
um had wins at nine hundred degrees fahrenheit and at
two and forty miles per hour. Of the suffocating ash.
It makes your brain boil and your flesh is vaporized
and your blood is vaporized, and they meld with this uh,

(05:26):
this volcanic ash to make a concrete or plaster like
coating on your bones. The groundwater and herculaneum helped too,
That's why some of it was preserved. And this was
just the first surge. There were multiple surges to follow.
Herculaneum ends up being buried in seventy five feet of
volcanic debris. Herculaneum is completely buried, but Pompeii is not.

(05:48):
There're still surges left to hit it, and lapalai and
ash are still falling and burying Pompeians in their home.
A lot of them are suffocating because no one can
breathe anymore. The first search to hit Pompeii basically kills
anyone who's left in the city, but it's followed by
these subsequent surges that continue to coat the city, but
everyone is is dead by them, and even some people

(06:11):
who managed to get outside the city walls were hit
by a pyroclastic surge. It's it's volcanoes third surge, but
it's the first one to hit Pompeii, which is the
next morning. This whole thing lasted nineteen hours, and so
at the end of it all, Pompeii is buried under palmice,
stones and ash nineteen to twenty three ft deep, which
is bad for trying to rebuild the city. Emperor Titus

(06:34):
declared it an emergency zone and offered funds. It's all
very modern sounding offers funds to help with cleanup and recovery,
but there's not anything you can really do about a
city buried under twenty three ft of ash, so it's quickly, um,
quickly forgotten, then lost. That fertile soil miss covers it

(06:54):
and people start farming eventually, and um, no one really
thinks about Pompeii. It disappears from the map for about
seventeen hundred years until the late sixteenth century when an
architect named Domenico Fontana discovered some of the ruins and
work at these archaeological sites in Pompeii and Herculaneum actually

(07:18):
ends up being sort of the start of modern archaeology
and some of the techniques we think about of modern archaeologists,
with the grid system and the little tools and methodically
charting and removing artifacts. It didn't necessarily always go like that,
and you know, in fact, the early digging was pretty haphazard,

(07:42):
and it wasn't until the eighteen sixties when an Italian
archaeologist named gspp Fiorelli became the director and really kind
of tightened up the operation. And before that people have
just been taking things like taking artwork and cutting off
frescoes and then framing it and sticking in their living
room like okay, I gotta go from. But the Queen
of Naples helped sponsor the digs because she wanted some

(08:03):
nice ancient statutory for her for her home. So it
was just sort of, you know, free cool ancient stuff
for the picking. Really intense excavation resumed after World War two,
and by nine it was declared a World Heritage and
there's actually still lots of Pompeii that hasn't been uncovered.

(08:25):
Some of it they want to stay covered in general,
but they did find lots of cool stuff when they
were looking well, and they want some of it to
stay covered because it once it's exposed, obviously, it's exposed
to all of the things and protested from here, you know,
whether that's rain or other weather, or just tourists walking

(08:46):
around and touching things. So remember if you go that
Pompeii is an open air museum and please stop touching everything.
So what are some of the cool things they found
in Pompeii. Well, the coolest thing that we were talking
about earlier as the private homes, because a lot of
times when a civilization falls or is destroyed, what you'll
find are the giant monuments and they did find some

(09:08):
of that. Yeah, they're paying. There are plenty of temples
and of sports fields, amphitheaters, government buildings, public them. You know,
things that you you would even find in modern cities
because they're would make it two thousand years they're what people,
you know, try to preserve and keep up um. But
private homes usually you don't find a two thousand year

(09:30):
old house, you know. Sarah and I were talking about
if something happened to Atlanta, what they would they would
call our houses because a lot of these are very
descriptive names, like the House of the Golden Bracelet based
on the House of the silver wedding sound, and the
mine would be the Apartment of cat Hair, and mine was,
unfortunately the House of the Ceiling Mushroom also due to
the rain. Hopefully and your landlord, hopefully of volcano doesn't

(09:54):
preserve this moment in time. But the houses in Pompeii
were lovely, especial like if you were wealthy, because they
had these huge private gardens and courtyards, really elaborate frescoes,
some of which were very erotic, which the King of
Naples was not happy about. He had them hidden for
years and years. Yeah, the pat deity of um Pompeii

(10:17):
was Venus, so it's not too surprising that there were
all these suggestion very fellow centric art. But we get
a really great record of several centuries worth of domestic
architecture from this time, because some of the houses in Pompei,
especially the older, more lavish homes, are about four hundred

(10:38):
years old when they're destroyed, and a lot of them
had modern conveniences, which might be surprising. Rooms were heated
by hot air running through cavities in the walls, and
there were spaces under the floors and hydraulic pumps that
gave running water. And we also get some nice touches
of but not quite so luxurious life there little inns

(11:00):
catering to lower class clientele. Um, there's graffiti written on
love house. The graffiti is alsome. I read one thing
that said the largely windowless fronts of the houses were
like the perfect temptation for graffiti on the streets. But
there was all kinds of stuff, um, love you know,
a little so and so, love so and so, and

(11:23):
a debate between which is better blondes or brunettes, and
even gladiatorial announcements, which one was calling Selidous the Thracian
the lady's choice. Well, well, Selidus, and it's it's just
really cool because most of that stuff doesn't last. When

(11:44):
you're an archaeologist, you don't often get to see graffiti
from the Roman Empire. Yeah, but it kind of humanizes
the people who live there and gives you an idea
of daily life, which is, you know, interesting to people
like us. How do people live in sev know, so
all of this you maybe not so much the um
Pompeii and graffiti, but the fancy houses, the frescoes, the mosaics,

(12:07):
all of this really influences European taste, much like later
archaeological excavations in Egypt would. Um new Classical revival kind
of comes up replaces the fully Coco. We even have
Marie Antoinette getting her Fontainebleu apartment decorated in a Pompeii
and style, and it became part of the quintessential grand

(12:32):
tour to go and see Pompeii when you were doing
your little European trap and Vesuvius today is actually still
a problem which we didn't know. You might want to
think before you make it part of your grand store
to day, or if you're thinking of moving to Naples,
maybe don't so. Vesuvius is a strato volcano. It's tall,

(12:53):
and it's mountainous, and it's also on the edge of
the Eurasian Plate which collides with the Africa Plate quite
it often. And the last enormous subplenty interruption not not
quite the size of Pompeii, but the last sizeable eruption
was in sixteen thirty one, and after that there were

(13:13):
a few centuries worth of lava streams and just little
bits of activity UM. And the last relatively small eruption
was in nineteen forty four. But this is kind of
the scary part. For the past twenty five thousand years,
and they can they know this from UM geological records.
The stuvious has had these catastrophic plenty in eruptions on

(13:37):
the scale of Pompeii nearly every two thousand years. Pompey
was the last major eruption eight seventy nine, which Katy
and I were calculating. This is about two thousand years
years ago, and three million people live in Naples today.
And if evacuation was a problem in a d seventy

(14:01):
nine Pompeii. I can't imagine what it would be like,
no the scale if that would be today. They have
drills and emergency procedures in place, and obviously our um
geology knowledge is a lot more extensive and hopefully we'd
be able to get a sizeable warning, but it's still
a rather unsettling thought thing to think about. The studious

(14:24):
is monitored around the clock by geologists, but it's it's
still a little scary to think of a modern Pompeii.
So don't be the house with cat hair. If you are,
get your stream off the ceiling before you're preserved in time.
So if you'd like to learn more about the volcanoes
and ancient history, head over to our home page and
check out the blog while you're at it at www

(14:45):
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