by Patrick Hunt
That began an unforgettable experiment. I thought up a short musical theme, easily remembered, and played it straight toward the far cliff. Pausing, I listened intently and when it returned almost as clear as it went out, I harmonized over it. I almost fell off the amphitheater terrace. It was almost a religious experience, like a miracle. I continued this for some minutes, architecturally adding third and sixth and ninth tones before there was any noticeable decay of sound dimming out in the first and second melody sent out. Even though I had studied and even written about planned acoustics in ancient Greek theaters, I had never heard of anything like this before. It was simply one of the most incredible moments in my life as I continued trying out harmonies and counterpoint melodies for probably close to half an hour. My excitement rose until it was almost unbearable. Near the end, out of the corner of my eye with peripheral vision I finally noticed a few persons had gathered around me, but I was too intent on the sound to even glance over at them. Then something happened that was slightly eerie. The clouds lifted slightly and sun broke through the mist, creating a triple rainbow, the first I had ever witnessed. It was so breathtaking, I used the inspiration to form a musical cadenza climax, gentle but intricate with almost endless arcs of harmonics, at which point I stopped because I was almost frightened by the beauty. As the music finally echoed and reechoed before finally dying away, I sensed there would never be a moment like this again in my life and I shivered.
Then after a minute or two of complete motionless silence, I suddenly realized the small amphitheater was packed with at least twenty people. I looked and saw all the people sitting there were Quechua; I had no idea where they had come from. A man slowly approached me with immense dignity. He looked at me with the most intense but respectful gaze through very thick glass lenses. I rose as he stood before me. He only came up to my chest but had the gravity of a huge man. His words were soft but firm in Quechua-inflected Spanish.
“Tu es un amauta. (You are an amauta.)”
“No, yo no soy un amauta. Solamente un arqueólogo. (No, I am not an amauta. Only an archaeologist.)”
“No, you are an amauta,” he insisted quietly. “Verdad. It is true. What you have done here today has not been done for five hundred years. This was a special place for this.” His quiet Spanish words were filled with certainty.
I nodded, roughly aware that his people—I later found he was a local headman—were silently observing from a short distance. I wanted to show respect, so I held out my hands and he clasped them in his, never taking his eyes off my face. He spoke again.
“Where did you learn to do this? How did you know?”
I was unsure what he meant. I tried to explain that I didn’t know. That I only guessed. How it just seemed perfect when the harmonies were kept alive by echoes. And then the rainbow just happened. But I feel fairly certain he didn’t quite believe me. It turned out his people were not officially part of the local Instituto Nacional de Cultura guards who worked around the site of Machu Picchu. I understood they were there guarding its sacredness in their own way, blending into the landscape mostly imperceptibly. I reluctantly left Machu Picchu but I talked to this headman several times and ultimately rode back on the long train trip to Cuzco with him surrounded by his village people as he gently probed me for what else I knew about the Inca. It was difficult in my pidgin Quechua and not-so-fluent Spanish to communicate clearly, but he invited me to visit him near Cuzco in a few days. He wrote his name and address in pencil on a piece of paper, but I was never able to take him up on his offer because I left a few days later.
Since the Quechua headman’s first and last words to me were that I was an amauta, I had to assume after all that he knew far more about these amautas than I did. Understanding more now—but still not enough—about how the amautas were the astronomers, architects, artists, poets and composers who led Inca science and art and amazingly integrated both nature and architecture into their mountain landscapes, being called an amauta is perhaps the highest compliment I have ever been paid, not just as a professional archaeologist but as one who passionately finds in ancient history the most exciting trail to follow, however far the enticing path leads.
Chapter 6
Pompeii
The Key to Roman Life
Southern Italy, 1748
An Italian farmer, whose name we will probably never know, was digging a well in the rich soil of the sleepy plain under Mount Vesuvius, which often had a column of ashy smoke rising from its dark peak even in 1748. The farmer was trying to reach the sinking water table so his summer crops could flourish. The sound of buzzing cicadas filled the hot air as his oxen stood nearby. His cart was nearly loaded with dirt to the side of a hole he was digging, buried up to his sweaty chest. He continued until he was at least ten feet deep as the soil became more yielding. Suddenly his iron pick hit something harder than the surrounding soil. He stopped and brushed away the dirt. What appeared before his startled eyes was a giant white marble head with staring eyes, looking as if he had just awakened it.
Renewing his digging more carefully, he soon found the head was joined to a colossal statue. It took him most of the day to clear the dirt away and then another hour for his oxen to lift it gingerly into the cart before hauling it to his house nearby. The next day, the farmer found a trove of other ancient objects and quickly realized he could easily sell his fields for far more than any crops would bring. He contacted the local viceroy, who loved antique art. The news spread like wildfire that a whole city was buried here from almost two thousand years earlier. Soon an unearthed inscription that had been carved on a now-broken portal even told the forgotten name of the lost city: Pompeii. . . . This story is so difficult to confirm that we can only wonder what the farmer’s name was or if it’s even true.
Few in 1748 would have guessed the fate that had quickly overtaken Pompeii. Even fewer would fathom at the time that its discovery would forever change what we know about Roman material culture, far more than any other single site. The enormous significance of its long-buried artifacts nearly outweighs all the remaining bulk of Roman artifacts put together. Many good reasons exist why Pompeii should be on any list of the most important discoveries in history, but here are a few primary ones. The catastrophe of Vesuvius buried Pompeii in little more than forty-eight hours, and we have eyewitness accounts written at the time. This accidental discovery of Pompeii in 1748 happened before archaeology was a science, and Pompeii became a magnet for travelers and collectors from the 1750s onward. Following its discovery, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature about Pompeii made its forgotten tragedy famous to an eager audience. Furthermore, the modern impact of continuing archaeological work at Pompeii has continued its original legacy. Surviving Pompeiian buildings help define Roman architecture, and Pompeii’s collections represent the best examples of Roman art. (Although Herculaneum was likely discovered first, with cursory excavation beginning around 1735, it was covered much deeper than Pompeii, with harder solidified mudstone and lava, and was therefore abandoned for decades more. As of this writing, Pompeii is still only around 65 percent excavated based on what remains unexplored inside the Roman city walls.)
The ensuing legacy of Pompeii’s past catastrophe and present blessing can hardly be appreciated. What is known about everyday Roman life is immeasurably determined by what has been unearthed at Pompeii since that farmer dug his well. Here is a salient fact: virtually 25 percent of what the world has collected from Roman material culture comes from being preserved by this one brief volcanic eruption that sealed an entire city, preserving much of its life even in death.
The buried city of Pompeii in its dying days of August AD 79 could never have known that its great misfortune would eventually grab the attention of the world. By the sheer volume of artifacts found there alone, no other site has provided so much knowledge about ancient Roman life. Because of the quickness of the catastrophe and the haste of the abandonment, no other place on earth has yielded such vast material documen
ting daily affairs and everyday possessions. The artifacts range from ivory combs to wall paintings, from scorched and carbonized papyri to gems and house pets, from priceless treasures in cameo glass to priceless records of the mundane including daily diet. Loaves of carbonized bread still on the table or in the ovens of ruined households, burned walnuts and even garden roots have been preserved. It has taken centuries to begin to assess the wealth of scholarship from Pompeii, and it is far from complete. But we can reconstruct much of the disastrous event in the summer of AD 79 as well as how Pompeiians lived up until that very day.
August 24, AD 79
On August 24 in AD 79, the long but late hot summer of southern Italy would have shown the typical heat waves shimmering off the circling mountains and the dramatic blue water of the Bay of Naples. Before the heat of the day, the early morning streets would have been filled as usual with shoppers going to and from open-air markets and citizens scurrying about in the shade whenever possible. Down at the wharf, fish of all kinds were sold directly from the dawn’s catches off Cape Misenum, where the water teemed with life. Vegetables and fruit were abundant in the Campanian soil. More than one poet or writer wrote truthfully about this place being Campania Felix, “Happy Campania.” Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption, wrote in his encyclopedic Natural History before AD 79: “There is one region where Nature has been at work in her joyous mood: Campania, the climate so temperate, the plains so fertile, the hills so sunny, the groves so shady.” Ironically, the city had just celebrated its Volcanalia festivities to the god Vulcan, the patron of craftsmen, famous for his divinely hot smithy where the god was said to forge and hammer molten iron from underneath the surrounding mountains.
If the citizens of Pompeii ever looked carefully down at their sandaled feet while they stepped across the paving, they might have noticed all of the dark paving stones, many naturally shaped in hexagons, were of solidified lava from nearby volcanic sources. The whole region was volcanic, a land where the magmatic lava had cooled and crystallized, eventually to be revealed at the surface and extracted from quarries. After eons of rain, sun, wind and other natural forces, much of the lava had broken down into soil. The fields around Pompeii were the richest and most fertile in Italy from the uncounted and mostly forgotten millennia of sporadic eruptions rich in ash and minerals. If they had looked up and seen Mount Vesuvius brooding over them, it was normal in the region of Campania for people to seek its cooler slopes for its sweeping vistas of the sparkling bay below and even plant lush vineyards climbing the peak. Very few must have recognized or wondered about the danger in store.
These Pompeiians were blessed, as everyone knew, since Pompeii was also the richest Roman port for luxury goods from Egypt and the East. Ships constantly sailed in and out of the harbor at the mouth of the Sarno River. Its dockside warehouses were filled with exotic goods to be dispersed to the wealthy throughout Italy and the rest of the empire, including the most precious commodities like frankincense, silk and pearls. The Bay of Naples, with its smaller towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae, was highly sought after for palatial residences away from Rome, and the Pompeiians’ huge coastal villas were laden with bronze and marble sculptures and lovely gardens. This was a veritable paradise where senatorial patrician families could relax near vast farms tended by numerous tenants and slaves and where local produce was crisp and cool because it had just been plucked or cut a few minutes earlier from the fragrant soil. Flowers bloomed everywhere on trellises and on the ground around low ornamental boxwood hedges. Judging by the opulent art of Pompeii, food was as plentiful on land as in the sea. In Pompeiian paintings, luscious fruits hang pendulous on trees; multitudes of fish gape from intricate Pompeiian mosaic floors whose tiny tiles are less than a quarter inch across. If the excavated art masterpieces are any index, clearly there were fortunes to be spent and made in wealthy Pompeii.
This was a city lucky in love too, as one of its patron goddesses was Venus herself, the icon of physical love, who blessed this people with deep passion and either a rich love life or the powerful fantasy of one. Her temple crowned the height of the city above the Sarno River and her presence was evident in vivid reminders all over the city: famous lupenare brothels on the heavily trafficked corners, innumerable phallic images stamped in brick or carved on walls, and painted or inscribed advertisements of exotic prostitutes whose names scrawled in civic graffiti claimed they could satisfy every physical craving. If anything typified the city of Pompeii in AD 79, it was prosperity, luxury and excess in nature as in human appetites. Who could find a better life anywhere in the Roman world than here under the shadow of Vesuvius?
The catastrophe of Vesuvius buried Pompeii in little more than forty-eight hours
August twenty-fourth must have dawned like every other summer morning in memory. But suddenly in a few hours everything changed. It is not difficult to reconstruct the events based on archaeology, volcanology and eyewitness accounts. Pompeii’s citizens had long tolerated the frequent tremors that shook the ground as a fair price to pay for living in the most beautiful region of Italy. But the early afternoon quiet of August 24 was broken by an explosion that jolted the whole city awake from its after-lunch nap. A sound louder than anything imaginable blasted the trembling air and buildings rocked on their foundations. Dust and chips fell everywhere as people ran in panic out into the streets to see what was happening. The sun must have been quickly blotted out by dark billowing clouds of ash and lapilli—tiny stones from the size of hail to golf balls—often of light pumice but also of heavier volcanic ejecta that would have begun falling quickly into the streets and pelting the roofs with incessant drumming. Although they would not have realized it, the entire top of the mountain had been blown apart and sent into the air, its force impelling everything up against gravity, sending millions of tons of rock, ash, steam and smoke along with poisonous gases higher than the clouds. Thousands of feet up in the air, the debris formed into a column that spread out like a giant tree with ominous branches visible for scores of miles as it descended, only to be replaced by more. Immediately around Pompeii and the surrounding towns, the midday became as dark as night. Handheld clay lamps would hardly have penetrated the gloom of dense ash falling everywhere and quickly piling up several feet deep in a matter of an hour or so.
Most of the approximately twenty-five thousand residents of Pompeii must have fled fairly quickly but many also stayed behind, either out of fear, hiding in the crowded alleys under eaves or inside buildings themselves, thinking it was safer, or because they might have thought it an opportune moment to rob with impunity a quickly emptying city. The authorities must not have known what to do other than flee themselves through the rubble and rain of stones. The proud city became total chaos. The sensible ones would have left quickly, abandoning almost all of their belongings, thinking only of saving their lives and those of their loved ones. Others would have quickly locked houses or gates and sought the safest exit to the countryside or the harbor.
But few knew that the harbor and the river itself were being blocked by either the geological effects of uplift or a receding coastline combined with a dammed river, and they were stranded on rocky dry ground at the wharves. Boats were empty without water for escape. Hundreds of people, including whole families, huddled in the dockside warehouses under or alongside useless boats. Here dense gases quickly settled with their poisonous stench, and the superheated air was actually burning in places. Anoxia quickly overcame people; they were already being choked by ash falling so thickly that they were asphyxiated by a number of deadly elements. A gaseous surge of boiling liquid ash swept through the burning city in the night and ended many lives of the trapped or hiding citizens who had survived the first hours. Many families must have been separated and many indistinguishable crying voices must have been heard everywhere. Husbands and wives, choking and holding futile cloths against their noses and mouths to breathe, were lying together with their children clutched against them to take their last em
braces as a thick quiet descended, punctuated only by the almost silent fall of ash and the intermittent rain of small and large stones against groaning roofs. The whole city was buried in an afternoon and a night of mostly volcanic ash mixed with lapilli and pumice that piled up more than twenty-five feet deep in places. In other places it piled even higher, so that it was above the rooftops of two-story buildings. An estimated 2,500 Pompeiians perished that day, although we may never know the exact total loss of life. This was truly the day a city died. Yet, without denying the tragedy of its citizens in this sudden destruction, important to archaeology and history is the fact that the sudden event of this volcanic eruption sealed much of the city of Pompeii from normal decay.