The day before the mountain exploded in 79 AD, Pompey was a thriving Roman city of 100,000 people, located on the shores of the Mediterranean in an area noted for the fertility of its soil. Overlooked by the Mt. Vesuvius, the city had mostly rebuilt itself after an earthquake of several years before.
The paved streets were carefully laid out at 90-degree angles, a Roman invention, and were bustling with chariots and people. The ruts made by chariot wheels were particularly obvious where taller stones provided pedestrian crossings that kept sandaled feet out of the mud and much that covered the streets.
Numerous restaurants offered hot food and delicious wine to the many daily visitors to Pompey. In the town’s large square, men of property and influence met to deal with both civic and business affairs. As was typical for the time, the majority of the city population was comprised of slaves while Roman citizens were a smaller ruling elite.
Some of the houses were large and luxurious, showing off the wealth and culture their owners had obtained by trade and travel with Africa to the South and Constantinople to the East. Sports were important topics of conversation, at least among the men, and ancient graffiti kept track of the victories won by competing gladiators.
Mt. Vesuvius began a series of enormous eruptions the next day, likely during the middle of the day. After the eruptions were finished, instead of a 9,000 ft. peak, the mountain would have a large crater between twin peaks of 3,800 feet. The eruptions would send molten lava down the mountain slopes to the city of Herculaneum, entombing it in hard rock. Pompey was not covered by lava, but rather, by thick layers of ash, which later turned to rock.
After the first eruption, many people ran down to the seashore where they were drowned by a large tsunami. Some of the people timidly went back to Pompey to dig through about 10 inches of ash, searching for valuables. It was those people who were permanently entombed in the city when a second, larger eruption sent poison gasses and mountains of 500 degree ash onto the city. Eventually, many feet of ash covered Pompey. So much ash fell that the ground level was raised and instead of being a seaside town, the buried city was more than two kilometers away from the ocean.
Within a day, the entire city was covered in ash, stopped and preserved just as it was the day before. Unlike other cities, where some buildings might be preserved over the centuries, all of Pompey was captured by the hardening ash.
As time passed, people even forgot the location of the buried city of Pompey, although stories of the city continued. From time to time, emperors and kings would send out parties of workers to dig for Pompey without success. The region continued to enjoy a reputation for wonderful farming, its soil enriched by the volcanic ash that had captured Pompey in its grip.
Not until the mid 1800’s did British archeologists rediscover the buried city. They were amazed at finding, nearly intact, an entire Roman city instead of only bits and pieces of this civilization. About 90 acres of the original city have been uncovered, with about 60 acres still buried. The excavation continues today, but the remaining buried portions of Pompey will never be uncovered. Instead, archeologists are creating tunnels into the ruins, but retaining the cap of hardened ash on top to protect at least part of the ancient city from complete destruction from an inevitable future eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
The first photo show a typical street with a crosswalk of raised stones and individual homes and businesses, laid out like townhouses. Another photo shows the painted garden wall of a wealthy merchant, full of strange beasts that he saw during his travels to Africa. The third photo shows part of a ruined temple that was on the large town square, an area approximately the size of a soccer field. Finally, there is a photo of the shape of a pregnant slave, who was caught and buried by the ash while she tried to cover her head. Over time, her body decayed, but the hardening ash preserved its shape during the intervening centuries. The archeologists filled the opening where her body had decayed with plaster before completely unearthing it, so we have her preserved during her last moments of life nearly two thousand years ago.
