When people think about the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction that it caused, Pompeii springs to mind, it is a household name. The story of the last days of Pompeii have become part of the defining legends of the past – retold in novels, movies, television series and song. As I write this, the new Hollywood movie POMPEII is due to be released – expected to be the biggest grossing film of 2014.
Very few people, however, know the story of Herculaneum. Destroyed in the same eruption of Vesuvius, Herculaneum offers the historian very different evidence and information. This is because of the nature of its destruction – while a victim of Vesuvius’ wrath, it suffered a very different death than that of Pompeii –its different location meant that it was destroyed under different circumstances and that this destruction followed a different time line.
Because of these different circumstances Herculaneum has a different story to tell.
Herculaneum was a very different city to Pompeii. It was a reasonably small walled town, located by the sea, with a range of elegant public buildings and a mix of private houses that reflected a wide range of social classes. It was a wealthier city than Pompeii. The town may not have been as busy a commercial centre as Pompeii and he evidence suggests that fishing may have been a major industry.
It was the first of the two cities to be discovered, and as a result suffered from much early plundering and looting. Herculaneum was buried much deeper by the volcano than Pompeii, more than 20 metres in some areas, so the first explorations of the site were carried out by tunnelling through the hardened ash. It was a difficult site to manage and when Pompeii was discovered, despite the wealth and extravagant finds from Herculaneum, it slowly took over in its status as the more desirable site. This was because it was much easier to excavate and to create an open air site, desirable for tourists. Then Giuseppe Fiorelli created the famous plaster casts and the myth of Pompeii was created. Herculaneum’s fate as the sister site was confirmed.
The eruption also gives us different information about Herculaneum. It was the first of the two towns to be destroyed. Herculaneum was also the first of the two cities to be destroyed in AD 79. The initial surge of superheated ash, rock and gas, following the collapse of the cloud ejected by Mount Vesuvius, raced towards Herculaneum and wiped it out in an instant. The city was buried so deeply that the upper story of buildings remained intact. The heat at Herculaneum was also much more intense, causing many wooden objects to become carbonized and preserved. The temperature during the eruption is could have reached 450°C in Herculaneum, which meant that organic material, like wood and foodstuffs, were preserved. At these temperatures, and encased in volcanic material which rapidly compacted and hardened to rock, wood did not burn, but was instantly carbonised – turned to charcoal. At Pompeii, where temperatures may only have reached a cooler 350°C, organic material has very rarely survived. It is Herculaneum that has yielded the furniture, the straw baskets and the loaves of bread.
The find, created by the eruption of Vesuvius, that fascinates me most of all comes from Herculaneum. In the Villa of the Papyri, some 1800 scrolls were discovered – the only library from the ancient Greco-Roman world to survive into the modern era. The work on these scrolls is ongoing. They are carbonised and require expensive technology to read the script. This work is an ongoing process.
There are various organisations dedicated to the study of the papyri. Among them:
—the National Library of Naples (which has owned the papyri since 1910);
—the “Marcello Gigante” International Centre for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri;
—the Centre for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART) of Brigham Young University in Utah;
—the Philodemus Project of the University of California at Los Angeles.
You will find these links useful in finding out more about the Villa of the Papyri:
https://sites.google.com/site/ad79eruption/herculaneum-1/villa-of-the-papyri
http://www.classics.ucla.edu/index.php/philodemus
Out of the Ashes - Documentary.
When the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 A.D., it not only froze an ancient civilization, it also preserved the only surviving library from antiquity.
For 250 years, scholars have struggled to unroll and read a collection of 1,800 carbonized and crumbling papyrus scrolls found in the wealthy Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. In the 21st century, promising new multi-spectral imaging technologies--enlisted by the National Library in Naples and Brigham Young University--reveal text that has not been seen for 2,000 years.
As archaeologists examine the partially excavated Villa of the Papyri, a new question emerges: Is there another library still buried at Herculaneum?
A KBYU documentary production, Out of the Ashes traces the history of the Herculaneum papyri from the time of the eruption, to their discovery in 1752, to modern developments that impact their study. An international team of experts provides perspective on this ancient library and its importance to scholars.
The program features the work of The BYU Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (ISPART) and four BYU scholars: Roger Macfarlane of the Department of Classics, Steve Booras and Daniel Oswald of ISPART, and Doug Chabries of the College of Engineering and Technology. It also features scholars from the University of Naples, Oxford, UCLA, Michigan, Texas A&M, Baylor, the Getty Research Institute and the British School of Rome.
Out of the Ashes includes rare footage inside the partially excavated Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, where the scrolls were all found in the 18th century. Hundreds of works of fine sculpture were also unearthed at the villa, which was owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The program also includes a description of the J. Paul Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., which was based on the floor-plan drawings of the original Villa of the Papyri.
Ironically, the destructive force of the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved this collection of papyri; the library probably would have deteriorated if it hadn't been carbonized and sealed under volcanic material.
When the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 A.D., it not only froze an ancient civilization, it also preserved the only surviving library from antiquity.
For 250 years, scholars have struggled to unroll and read a collection of 1,800 carbonized and crumbling papyrus scrolls found in the wealthy Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. In the 21st century, promising new multi-spectral imaging technologies--enlisted by the National Library in Naples and Brigham Young University--reveal text that has not been seen for 2,000 years.
As archaeologists examine the partially excavated Villa of the Papyri, a new question emerges: Is there another library still buried at Herculaneum?
A KBYU documentary production, Out of the Ashes traces the history of the Herculaneum papyri from the time of the eruption, to their discovery in 1752, to modern developments that impact their study. An international team of experts provides perspective on this ancient library and its importance to scholars.
The program features the work of The BYU Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (ISPART) and four BYU scholars: Roger Macfarlane of the Department of Classics, Steve Booras and Daniel Oswald of ISPART, and Doug Chabries of the College of Engineering and Technology. It also features scholars from the University of Naples, Oxford, UCLA, Michigan, Texas A&M, Baylor, the Getty Research Institute and the British School of Rome.
Out of the Ashes includes rare footage inside the partially excavated Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, where the scrolls were all found in the 18th century. Hundreds of works of fine sculpture were also unearthed at the villa, which was owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The program also includes a description of the J. Paul Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., which was based on the floor-plan drawings of the original Villa of the Papyri.
Ironically, the destructive force of the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved this collection of papyri; the library probably would have deteriorated if it hadn't been carbonized and sealed under volcanic material.