Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  Unfortunately, on the other hand, protecting what has been long unearthed has not always been as important. Conservation of buildings and objects on the vast site has often not kept pace with current unearthing of the Roman city, and Pompeii is badly in need of repairs. Rampant vandalism has destroyed many clay amphorae that used to grace buildings. Repair work is a constant need as reconstructed timbers rot and the hordes of visitors take their toll on the old buried city, a city that was in better shape when not exposed to the elements. Between the effects of humidity and winter rainfall, archaeological tourism, and lack of conservation, the site that became the blueprint for archaeology may become precarious, its very continuity and survival threatened.

  Visitors from abroad simply must see Pompeii if they are within a hundred miles of Naples, if they truly want to be educated about Roman life. Pompeii is an education in itself and it is unfathomable not to see it if able. “Pompeii is a household name,” says Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School in Rome.

  More people visit Pompeii now in one single day than in whole seasons of the previous centuries. Pompeii often sees more than fifty-five thousand visitors a day in midsummer. It is still the most visited intact ancient city in Europe. Strangely, despite the masses of tourists, one can still be the solo visitor on a lonely street corner in Pompeii where the only faces seen are those carved on stone fountains at road junctions. Anyone from the last century who has spent much time in Pompeii, walking its paved streets or peering into its ghostly houses, or in the treasure house where its artifacts are stored, the great National Museum in Naples, invariably encounters this fact: even with myriad inventories that can hardly be counted from over two hundred years of excavation, the mind-boggling reality is that this massive collection covers barely two days of destruction.

  Pompeiian structures help define Roman architecture

  One of the most important facts to understand about Pompeii is how much its preserved urban skeleton has helped historians and archaeologists reconstruct the general architectural plan of a Roman city, an urban planning pattern repeated wherever the Romans went. These features common to any Roman city are abundantly clear at Pompeii. The Romans usually built new cities around a forum, the administrative, religious, commercial and judicial core, with temples, courts, markets and the like. Pompeii is filled with the clearest examples of these urban units, up to three and four yards high, where most ruined Roman cities have only remnant foundations left, barely a few feet high.

  In the overall Roman urban plan, two major thoroughfares provide the directional axes of a city, the north-south cardo maximus and the east-west decumanus maximus, often leading to major city gates wherever possible. If the city began from a fortified military encampment called a castra, the resulting square-shaped city may be surrounded by a wall. Minor streets branch off from the two main avenues. Distributed along these two axes were theaters, amphitheaters, public and private baths and other civic structures as well as residences. Our word domicile derives from the Roman word domus, a large urban residential house.

  Thanks to Pompeii, we know a typical Roman house is essentially a walled courtyard with an entrance but without windows. The grander Roman houses multiply elements such as interior courtyards (colonnaded peristyles) around other rooms or features. Pompeiian houses rarely deviate from this idea, also following a common pattern with at least one street side entrance into an atrium, a small colonnaded courtyard with a rainwater catchment basin called an impluvium (roughly meaning “rainwater [goes] into [it]”). Beyond this the house pattern may follow the inner peristyle, garden (hortus) and wings (alae) of the house with a three-couch-studded dining room (triclinium) and a highly decorated formal reception room (tablinum). It is possible in some houses that one can see all the way through the house from atrium to peristyle, and beyond to the kitchen (culina) and bedrooms (cubiculae ), as well as to an outer courtyard. In most houses, a private lararium contained the house shrines kept to revere ancestors.

  Pompeii has most likely added more to the historical perception of the typical Roman house than any other site. Nearby Herculaneum is more of a town than a city like Pompeii and its houses were usually larger, but it is Pompeii that best represents a Roman city for understanding urban Roman life.

  Pompeii’s collections represent the best examples of Roman art

  Pompeii was certainly a morbid fascination for some, but it was even more appreciated by savants and art collectors or antiquarians like Sir William Hamilton. Securing a diplomatic post as the British minister plenipotentiary, Hamilton became known as the “Volcano Lover.” He arrived in Naples in 1764 and ultimately climbed Vesuvius a score of times even during the frequent new eruptions of Vesuvius of the late eighteenth century. Although he was well known in his day as both a diplomat and a collector, he was also a cuckold, the tolerant husband of the infamously beautiful Lady Emma Hamilton, who became Lord Nelson’s lover. Hamilton’s 1775 portrait by David Allan from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London (now on permanent loan to the British Museum) shows a slender, hawk-nosed aging aristocrat of dignity standing in his crimson Knight of the Order of the Bath regalia next to a window through which Vesuvius is seen smoking in the distant sunset. Along with the efforts of the Society of the Dilettanti, a mostly aristocratic group of young British aesthetes who appreciated ancient art, Hamilton’s collection helped form the inspiration and backbone of the early British Museum collections of Roman art. Much of Hamilton’s Roman art collection was obtained in Naples and from Pompeiian contexts.

  Roman wall painting would be virtually nonexistent without Pompeii. Only a few handfuls of extant paintings elsewhere can even begin to compare to the hundreds found at Pompeii. Most of these were cleverly transported to the National Museum in Naples but many can still be seen on-site. They are of such a quantity, so definitive and so well preserved, that for at least a century now, Roman art historians have divided the spectacular wall paintings of Pompeii into four datable phases between the second century BC to AD 79 when Pompeii was snuffed out. Although many Pompeiian wall paintings are architectural or dramatic fantasies, they show that remarkable realism was a Roman accomplishment long before the Renaissance. Treasures like the Wounded Aeneas, Europa Riding a Bull, and Bacchus painted as a grape cluster before an unerupted Vesuvius are gems. To best understand the importance of Pompeii and its art, both the ruined city and the National Museum in Naples must be seen together.

  Roman mosaics are also wonderfully preserved from Pompeii, many of them listed as the most important in the world, such as the Battle of Issus mosaic depicting Alexander the Great meeting King Darius of Persia in 333 BC. This mosaic dates to about 100 BC, and it is made up of at least a million small tessera tiles, most of which are smaller than a quarter inch across. It is massive, around seventeen by nine feet, and its incredible range of warm colors is subtle, with many hues of brown and creamy tones even in its incomplete remnants. Discovered in 1831 in the House of the Faun, Goethe remarked about it the following year:Neither the present nor the future will be able to comment fittingly on such a remarkable work of art, and we shall be eternally obliged, after all our studies and explanations, to contemplate it in wonder pure and simple.

  Other famous Pompeiian mosaics include a Sea Scene Fish Market that is remarkably lifelike—so realistic that the almost three-dimensional fish and other sea life still have gaping mouths and bulging eyes that look freshly wet. Marine biologists can still identify every species here from the Bay of Naples because each is rendered so perfectly, whether octopus, lobster, squid, red mullet, moray eel, skate or murex. Also famous is the Cave canem—“Beware of Dog”—mosaic that can be seen on the site in a forlorn doorway, still guarding the house as a reminder of a once-living dog that it resembles. These examples represent only a selected microcosm of Pompeii’s art.

  Bronze and marble sculptures, famous cameo treasures of thinly carved sardonyx agate stone, and many other treasures came from Pompeii, g
iving us the most complete picture we have about Roman art. One can hardly open a text on Roman art without noting that the majority of examples derive from Pompeii and its neighboring towns.

  There is no way to do justice in one brief chapter to the literally tens of thousands of objects of art and craft or the huge quantity of utilitarian household goods from Pompeii, but the city of Pompeii needs to be seen in tandem with the National Museum in Naples to give an idea of the quantity and quality of materials excavated in two and half centuries. No other museum in the world is devoted to primarily one event, with so many masterpieces and defining archetypes of human activity and art all derived from a few square miles in a several-day cataclysm.

  Conclusion

  In retrospect, it is the eyewitness Pliny the Younger in AD 79 whom modern volcanologists credit with first describing in his letters what is now called a “Plinian” eruption. Trained by his uncle and namesake to observe everything carefully, Pliny was amazingly accurate in geological detail, from rains of pumice and lapilli to pyroclastic flow and atmospheric disturbances. We now know the Plinian eruption at Vesuvius was due to several factors of deep internal geomorphology. Below the Bay of Naples, seawater and groundwater seeped ever downward through cracks in the crustal earth toward high-temperature magma in an active volcanic zone below Vesuvius, ultimately forming a body of water in occasional contact with vents and cracks where magma surged upward. Trapped water such as this boils and creates tremendous steam pressure that can explode whole mountains of rock in a pyrotechnic display rarely seen. This also caused the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the “shot heard round the world” where a whole island disappeared in a matter of minutes.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Nietzsche satirically commented about modern life in general, “Go ahead, build your house on Mt. Vesuvius.” Anyone driving by Vesuvius today will see just that: modern houses are again creeping up the slopes even though the local provincial government has offered relocation money to offset the ignored peril. It’s true, the views are fantastic, and real estate on Mount Vesuvius is a relative bargain considering the risk, but no smart insurers will offer policies. The last eruption was in 1944. How many Neapolitans can even remember its billowing column of smoke captured on dramatic black-and-white photos at the time? These photos are older than all the lively young Neapolitans who careen around on buzzing Vespas, sometimes four to a scooter, through the infamously wild traffic where horns and brakes interchange in cacophony. One cannot help but notice how similar humans are to our antecedents. The beauty of Naples is justifiably mirrored in its handsome citizens, who resemble their Greek and Roman ancestors in their capricious love of life. Their ability to laugh at destiny does not mock history but allows them a fatalistic appreciation of the moment and of ephemera, enjoying short life to the hilt. Neapolitans today know that Campania Felix is no myth even in the shadow of Vesuvius. A famous phrase still rings across Europe. In musical Italian it sings bittersweetly: Vedi Napoli e poi muori. “See Naples and then die.” Like Pompeii before it, Naples is still so full of reckless life.

  Perhaps the Pompeiians should have heeded the warning from a massive earthquake that shook the city so badly in AD 63 that repairs were still being made when Vesuvius finally blew sixteen years later. Perhaps slightly contemporary Roman geographers like Strabo (who died circa AD 24), who had observed active vulcanism at Mount Etna in Sicily, may have noticed the volcanic cone similarity in Vesuvius. Perhaps he should have left some public records for future Romans as warnings against the potential devastation, since villages were regularly evacuated in the path of Etna’s spewing molten streams of fire. But whatever hindsight is applicable, one thing is certain: Pompeii’s great misfortune is our fortune. Endless artifacts fill almost an entire national museum, and libraries will never exhaust the continuing study of Pompeii.

  So unlike typical archaeological material—usually broken and fragmentary—from most sites, Pompeii’s artifacts and those of the surrounding towns are remarkably intact and complete. A whole nomenclature of archaeology was invented and applied to deal with Pompeii’s discovery and subsequent revelation to a world curious and itself deeply sympathetic to the shuddering of a lost city. Pompeii not only opened up a lost world, its discovery fueled a new discipline. Thus, modern archaeology can be traced back to the discovery of Pompeii.

  If a citizen of Pompeii from before AD 79 were to be suddenly thrust into the Pompeii, or neighboring town of Herculaneum, of today, the city is so intact that this person could return to his or her house on its street and usually find it quite easily. This is unlike any other ancient place in the Roman world, and that is one reason why many archaeologists believe Pompeii is now probably more important to archaeology than the great imperial city of Rome itself.

  Chapter 7

  Dead Sea Scrolls

  The Key to Biblical Research

  Dead Sea cliffs, 1947

  Two boys in the Judean desert in 1947 made what is probably the most important biblical find of the millennium. They later claimed they were looking for a lost goat or two, but it is just as likely they were doing what curious boys everywhere love to do: explore caves. The first tattered skin rolls with faded scripts that the Bedouin boys found have transformed scholarship for over half a century now, and even if the controversies about what they mean haven’t subsided, the discovery story itself is nearly as priceless for history as the scrolls themselves. Known for centuries as Khirbet Qumran (“ruins of Qumran” in Arabic), it isn’t hard to imagine how Qumran, near where the scrolls were found, could be considered the end of the world in its desert isolation. This remoteness is true not just for us but even for the Bedouins who lived there in their tents under the shadows of the cliffs, not far from the canyon known in Arabic as Wadi Qumran, or “dry riverbed” of Qumran. This same remoteness is also a contributing factor why they weren’t discovered for so long.

  Since being found in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls saga reads much like spy fiction rather than truth, and the scrolls are often embroiled in religious and political controversy over their meaning and ownership. Yet this debate over what they mean and who owns them cannot undermine the importance of the documents. Here are a few reasons why the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is acknowledged as one of the most important in history. The ancient scrolls were remarkably well preserved by the aridity of the desert for almost two thousand years, and the discovery story itself is an exciting tale of intrigue and deception. The scrolls contain the oldest biblical manuscript material yet known; their discovery has pushed back our possession and knowledge of biblical manuscripts by more than a thousand years, and the oldest document dates from about 250 BC. They also provide a unique perspective on Jewish religious sects from the first century AD, revealing much more than was previously known. These writings help date ancient material by showing linguistic evolution, and they have been a tempestuous battlefield for modern scholarship. The scrolls were also inextricably connected to Israel’s early statehood. The segments of this incredible story can now be woven together in ways that flesh out facts about these scrolls discovered from the caves at Qumran, now much better known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. How the boys actually discovered the texts is something of a debate as well, but their excitement would have been unmistakable and contagious.

  How the discovery unfolded

  Apparently these two young Bedouin shepherd boys with pounding hearts lay side by side at the top of a cliff one early afternoon. They were flat on their stomachs with barely enough room for both of them to hang over the narrow edge of this desert bluff. Their sandaled feet dug into the rounded cliff and avoided the drop off the dangerously slippery precipice as they peered into the deep blackness below them where a crack, one foot wide, had recently opened up. They didn’t know they were probably the first ones to disturb the dust of this Dead Sea cliff for nearly two millennia. One of the boys, Mohammed adh-Dhib, had discovered this crack the day before but had been too afraid to explore by hi
mself so he brought his older cousin back the next day to explore further. But like boys everywhere, daring each other on risky escapades, these boys knew their village relatives and elders would disapprove of their sneaking off. So instead of pretending to herd their goats when they were actually on an adventure, they had tied the herd together and then to a towering rock not too far away.

  The desert sun was blinding in the hot blue sky and the dust they stirred up probably made them cough. Dropping nearby pebbles and then rocks down into the hole to gauge its depth, they were surprised to hear distinct ricocheting noises and then what sounded like pottery breaking far below them. Digging only with their small hands, scrabbling at the disintegrating rock with quickly roughening fingernails, they gradually enlarged the crack until it was a sizable gap and the more slender of the two could squeeze down into it with a rope tied around his waist, using his knees and elbows to keep from descending too fast.