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The City of Pompeii
Pompeii, was built at the mouth of the Sarnus River (now Sarno), a few miles south of Mount
Vesuvius, between Herculaneum and Stabiae. The city was founded about 600 BC by the Oscans. Under
the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla it became a Roman colony in 80 BC and later it was a favorite resort for
wealthy Romans, reaching a population of about 20,000 at the beginning of the Christian era. The city was
damaged by an earthquake in AD 63 and was completely demolished in AD 79 by the massive eruption of
Vesuvius that overwhelmed the towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
The eruption also changed
the course of the Sarnus and raised the sea beach, placing the river and the sea at a considerable distance
from the ruined city and obscuring the original site.
For more than 1500 years Pompeii lay undisturbed beneath heaps of ashes and cinders, and not until
1748 were excavations undertaken. The importance of the discoveries first came to the attention of the
world through the work of the German classical archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. New
discoveries continued to be made throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. In 1912, in a street that
connects the Strada dell' Abbondanza with the amphitheater,
several houses were found, each with a
balcony on the second floor that was 6 m (20 ft) long and 1.5 m (5 ft) deep. This section of the city is known
to tourists as the Nuovi Scavi (New Excavations). Some of the ruins were badly damaged by air raids during
World War II and had to be restored. Additional excavations are continuously made. More than one-fourth
of the city remains to be excavated, and much of this area lies beneath piles of earth heaped up from earlier
excavations.
Among the most significant aspects of the discoveries at Pompeii is the remarkable degree of
preservation of the ancient objects. The showers of wet ashes and cinders that accompanied the eruption
formed a hermetic seal about the town, preserving many public structures, temples, theaters, baths, shops,
and private dwellings. In addition, remnants of some of the 2000 victims of the disaster were found in the
ruins of Pompeii,
including several gladiators who had been placed in chains to prevent them from escaping
or committing suicide. Ashes, mixed with rain, had settled around the bodies in molds that remained after
the bodies themselves had turned to dust. Liquid plaster was poured into some of these molds by the
excavators, and the forms of the bodies have thereby been preserved; some of these figures are exhibited in
the museum erected at Pompeii near the Porta Marina, one of the eight gates of the city.
Most of the inhabitants escaped the eruption, carrying with them their movable assets. After the eruption
they tunneled into and around the houses and public buildings, and carried off almost everything of value,
even to the extent of stripping marble slabs from the buildings. For this reason few objects of great value
have been discovered at Pompeii. Most of the movable objects that were found, and some of the best-
executed wall paintings and floor mosaics, have been removed to the National Museum in Naples. Taken
together, the buildings and objects provide a remarkably realistic and complete picture of life in an Italian
provincial city of the 1st century AD. The surviving edifices, representing a transition from the pure Greek
style to the building methods of the Roman Empire, have been especially important for the study of Roman
architecture.
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