Pompeii And Herculaneum: Snapshots In Time

Pompeii and Herculaneum:

Snapshots in Time

Have you heard of the cities destroyed in a day Pompeii was a Roman city in Italy located 14 miles from Naples, and next to an active volcano named Mt. Vesuvius. In 79 A.D. the volcano erupted. The eruption had many stages. The first stage of the eruption was the tremors that happened the days before the eruption. The second stage of the eruption was a series of small eruptions from Mt. Vesuvius. The third stage was the very large eruption from Mt. Vesuvius. After the third stage the sun was clouded out with ash from the volcano. Lastly, the streets flooded with ash. The ash that flooded the streets perfectly preserved the city. When a surveying engineer discovered the city in 1748, the city was excavated from the ash and to the people's surprise, nearly everything was perfectly preserved, like a snapshot of history. Under the ash, the researchers found preserved remains of the people that lived there, bread still in ovens,

What's the big deal?” The big deal is that these ancient cities have taught us so much stuff about ancient roman culture. For example, because of the petrified food, we know what the people’s diet was. Also that their was very definite size and bone strength between the poor and the rich because of what they ate. We also have a better idea of what ancient Roman architecture looked like and the differences between the poor and the wealthiest homes. Archaeologists also found found many museum pieces; like a loaf of bread with the name of a slave carved into it, many different types of jewelry, and an eyewitness account of the eruption written by a man named Pliny the Younger, and much more. And last but not least they discovered what Roman life was like, from the food, to the people. The discovery of Pompeii is by far one of if not the best example of ancient Roman life we have found so far, and we will possibly ever