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Selects: How Pompeii Worked · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck is here in spirit too,
0:04
Speaker 1: and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that
0:07
Speaker 1: we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing
0:11
Speaker 1: this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February
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Speaker 1: one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February
0:18
Speaker 1: two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on
0:22
Speaker 1: February three, for SF Sketch Fest, will be at the
0:25
Speaker 1: Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our social
0:28
Speaker 1: media's for more information and links to tickets, and we'll
0:32
Speaker 1: see you in February. Hey, everybody, have you ever been
0:38
Speaker 1: buried under ash from a volcano? Well? I haven't either,
0:41
Speaker 1: but the people of Pompey were, so this episode How
0:45
Speaker 1: Pompey Worked goes back to February and it was a
0:48
Speaker 1: good one. It's our real cracker, so check it out. Now.
0:55
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
0:58
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
1:08
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. We're
1:12
Speaker 1: all wearing togas, which makes the Stuff you Should Know,
1:17
Speaker 1: the Ancient Roman Edition or the Animal House Edition. Yeah
1:22
Speaker 1: it could be. I'm blue do I just saw that
1:27
Speaker 1: that movie that Netflix movie about Oh yeah, Doug Kenny
1:31
Speaker 1: and then Lampoon. Is it good? Well, the documentary is better.
1:37
Speaker 1: Oh is this like a biopic? Uh? Yeah, I mean yeah,
1:42
Speaker 1: it's a movie movie. I got you. Yeah, I judge
1:46
Speaker 1: my um what I watch on Netflix just based on
1:49
Speaker 1: like the illustration or the drawing or the art. And
1:53
Speaker 1: sometimes that's a good rule of thumb, in other times
1:55
Speaker 1: it's not. But that one I kind of avoided it
1:57
Speaker 1: because of the art. Yeah, I mean it's not great.
2:00
Speaker 1: I kind of enjoyed it because I like all the
2:04
Speaker 1: people and it's kind of fun seeing someone be Bill
2:07
Speaker 1: Murray and someone be Chevy Chase and John Belushi and
2:10
Speaker 1: a little bit of the making of Animal House and Caddyshack.
2:13
Speaker 1: But ultimately the documentary is much better. What's the name
2:15
Speaker 1: of the documentary, um A drunk, stoned, brilliant dead, or
2:21
Speaker 1: some combination of those words. I'm not sure I've come
2:24
Speaker 1: across that. Yeah, that's that's really good. But brilliant and
2:27
Speaker 1: feudal gesture, feudal and stupid gesture. Yeah, that's right. Is uh?
2:31
Speaker 1: I give it two stars. I don't know how out
2:35
Speaker 1: of how many though, I've just been steady consuming riff
2:40
Speaker 1: tracks as fast as they'll clear him on Amazon Prime. Really, yeah,
2:45
Speaker 1: that stuff never gets old. It really doesn't. It really
2:48
Speaker 1: really doesn't. All right, Chuck. Now that we've gotten our
2:52
Speaker 1: initial tangent a k a. The introduction out of the
2:55
Speaker 1: way recommended viewing, right, um, let's talk Pompeii. Yeah, because
3:03
Speaker 1: I mean that's what we're doing today. And frankly, it's
3:06
Speaker 1: two thousand and eighteen. We've been doing this for almost
3:10
Speaker 1: a decade now, we're coming up on a decade in
3:12
Speaker 1: a few months in April. Yeah, and we this is
3:16
Speaker 1: the first we're doing on Pompeii. And that is just
3:19
Speaker 1: utterly mind blowing to me. It really is, considering we've
3:23
Speaker 1: done shows on both volcanoes and super volcanoes um and
3:28
Speaker 1: our our show on tiny volcanoes all right, that was
3:34
Speaker 1: Little the Littlest Volcano. That was so good. It is
3:38
Speaker 1: weird that we're finally getting around to us. Yeah, it
3:40
Speaker 1: really is. Because we've also done like the Seven Wonders,
3:43
Speaker 1: We've done tons of archaeology stuff. It's it's strange. We
3:46
Speaker 1: did one on the real Atlantis, remember that one. Nope,
3:50
Speaker 1: it was a good one. You should go back and
3:52
Speaker 1: listen to it. Really, yeah, man, Yeah, I was like, oh, Monopoly,
3:57
Speaker 1: we haven't done one on that and looked it up
3:59
Speaker 1: and yep, we should have. I do remember that one.
4:01
Speaker 1: I was scouring my brain like, Okay, what what was
4:05
Speaker 1: this episode? Like? What did we talk about? Nothing? It's
4:09
Speaker 1: like it never happened. I mean, maybe we should just
4:12
Speaker 1: go back and re record some of these for our
4:14
Speaker 1: own benefit. Okay, reboot our own show, right just for us?
4:20
Speaker 1: So um, okay, Well, we are finally talking POMPEII, and
4:25
Speaker 1: to do that, we have to go back the way
4:27
Speaker 1: Back machine and we should probably bring helmets and the
4:32
Speaker 1: dog attack outfits that those those trainers wear. Yeah, and
4:36
Speaker 1: also we need to fuel the way back with olive
4:39
Speaker 1: oil on this trip. Let's we need to retrofit it
4:42
Speaker 1: because we'll be in big trouble if we don't. Well,
4:44
Speaker 1: let's use the good stuff, like the really high grade stuff,
4:47
Speaker 1: because it burns my throat. I like the mid grade
4:49
Speaker 1: e v o O, So let's save that for eating,
4:53
Speaker 1: use the high test stuff for traveling. Oh you don't
4:55
Speaker 1: like really get olive wood? H No, I don't I
4:59
Speaker 1: want to say that I do, but I don't. It
5:01
Speaker 1: burns my throat. Yeah, like when you just do shots
5:05
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, maybe that's the problem. Shot of olive oil,
5:09
Speaker 1: shot of crank case soil. Well, you know what they say,
5:15
Speaker 1: olive oil before crank case oil never sicker, right, No,
5:18
Speaker 1: it's the other. Oh god, alright. So we're in the
5:27
Speaker 1: way back machine. We have our our rescue gear. We
5:31
Speaker 1: have our olive oil. It's our dog attack gear. Sure
5:35
Speaker 1: why because the dogs there? No, because of the falling
5:38
Speaker 1: pummice in stone that's about to hit the area. Yeah,
5:41
Speaker 1: but there. I just wondered because they're very famously was
5:44
Speaker 1: a cast of a dog, and there's actually a very
5:47
Speaker 1: famous mosaic that says cave conum, which is aware of dog. Okay,
5:52
Speaker 1: so yeah there are dogs there. Well, good thing, we
5:55
Speaker 1: got that suit right in our nice dispositions. Good dog. Okay.
6:01
Speaker 1: So we're we're here. It's pretty nice. It's a very
6:04
Speaker 1: nice area. It's pretty well populated. This is Pompeii itself,
6:08
Speaker 1: and Pompeii is one of several towns right around here
6:11
Speaker 1: on the Bay of Naples. And if you look up
6:13
Speaker 1: over here, that giant, almost cartoonishly volcanic volcano over there.
6:20
Speaker 1: That's Vesuvious. It's like an eight year old drew of
6:24
Speaker 1: volcano and put it in Italy at the Bay of
6:26
Speaker 1: Naples by Naples, and uh, that's it. That's that's Vesuvius.
6:31
Speaker 1: It's a it's what's called a strato volcano. That's right. Uh,
6:37
Speaker 1: And well, I guess we should. You can go back
6:40
Speaker 1: and listen to volcanoes from December two thousand ten or
6:45
Speaker 1: super volcanoes just last April. But for those of you
6:49
Speaker 1: don't know, a strato volcano is sort of if you
6:51
Speaker 1: think about the just the run of the mill traditional
6:55
Speaker 1: volcano and a cartoon where it just pops like a
7:00
Speaker 1: campaigne bottle, that's a strato volcano. Yeah, and it's it's
7:04
Speaker 1: actually just built up from previous explosions. So the very
7:07
Speaker 1: presence of a strato volcano indicates that there's been a
7:10
Speaker 1: lot of activity in that area and it's blown straight
7:13
Speaker 1: up into the air and then come down and settle
7:15
Speaker 1: down around it, and now you have a new layer
7:18
Speaker 1: and it just builds up as a cone. And the
7:20
Speaker 1: thing about the strato volcanoes, like you said, it pops
7:22
Speaker 1: like a cork. The reason it does that is because
7:25
Speaker 1: the lava that's kind of slowly growing and building up
7:28
Speaker 1: over time, UM has gases that it seeps into the rock,
7:32
Speaker 1: the surrounding rock that makes up the volcano, right and
7:36
Speaker 1: um when those gases finally overcome a certain threshold, the
7:39
Speaker 1: pressure threshold, that's when that cork goes off. And it's
7:43
Speaker 1: about to happen, because it's either August or September or October,
7:52
Speaker 1: and we're here in Pompeii. Yeah, and we should also
7:56
Speaker 1: mention to you there are other volcanoes around if you
7:58
Speaker 1: look around, because this isn't a unique area of Europe.
8:03
Speaker 1: That is called the companion arc uh and there are
8:06
Speaker 1: quite a few volcans, well not quite a few, but
8:08
Speaker 1: there are several volcanoes. Vesuvius obviously the most active and
8:13
Speaker 1: deadly um and famous. But what the companion arc is
8:18
Speaker 1: or companion is there's a process called subduction where basically
8:23
Speaker 1: a tectonic plate bumps up against another one and moves
8:27
Speaker 1: down into the mantle beneath the other plate. And that's
8:30
Speaker 1: what's going on here where the African plate is meeting
8:33
Speaker 1: the Eurasian plate. Right. So there's like all that um
8:36
Speaker 1: hot molten earth that's kind of bubbling up through that seam,
8:40
Speaker 1: and one of those holes is the volcano that we
8:43
Speaker 1: know is Vesuvius. Right, yes, okay, so we got here
8:47
Speaker 1: just in time to look around for a little bit
8:48
Speaker 1: and kind of take in the the culture of the
8:51
Speaker 1: area before the volcano. It's very nice. It is very nice.
8:56
Speaker 1: It was like a very very wealthy town, but not
9:00
Speaker 1: really an important town as far as the Roman Empire
9:03
Speaker 1: was concerned, but there were there was an inordinate amount
9:06
Speaker 1: of wealthy people, and those wealthy people were inordinately wealthy. Um,
9:11
Speaker 1: and they spend a lot of money on the town.
9:13
Speaker 1: There's lots of statues everywhere. There's a good number of temples. Um.
9:18
Speaker 1: There's one to isis. Uh, there's one a Jupiter. Um.
9:21
Speaker 1: There's a big amphitheater and a big theater as well,
9:26
Speaker 1: two separate things. Yeah, there's one that holds twenty thousand people,
9:30
Speaker 1: which um, at its peak, that's how many people lived
9:33
Speaker 1: in Pompeii. Which is a very democratic thing to do,
9:37
Speaker 1: to say that, hey, uh, we're gonna host a show
9:41
Speaker 1: here and we want everyone to be able to come
9:43
Speaker 1: right and and that that's pretty cool that they did
9:46
Speaker 1: do that, because there's a pretty mixed population in Pompeii
9:49
Speaker 1: at the time, Pompeii and suburban Pompeii, which included Herculaneum,
9:53
Speaker 1: uh Stabia, and um what was the other one, Chuck,
9:59
Speaker 1: there's uh plazas, plazas Okay, Okay, So there's this string
10:07
Speaker 1: of towns, but Pompeii is definitely the biggest of all
10:09
Speaker 1: of them, and that's kind of like the center of
10:11
Speaker 1: the area, right. But there's a lot of different people,
10:14
Speaker 1: a lot of different type of people who were kind
10:17
Speaker 1: of who kind of gravitated towards Pompeii. It was like
10:20
Speaker 1: a cosmopolitan area, right, So you had wealthy people, you
10:23
Speaker 1: have poor people, you have people from different areas. That's right.
10:26
Speaker 1: And it was also kind of unique for its time
10:30
Speaker 1: and that it was. It was a bit of a
10:32
Speaker 1: resort town, so wealthy people all around Italy. Actually, some
10:39
Speaker 1: of them would have I guess what you would call
10:42
Speaker 1: it now would be a vacation home. Uh. And that
10:44
Speaker 1: kind of got me down a rabbit hole of vacationing,
10:47
Speaker 1: Like when did that actually begin? Because I had no
10:49
Speaker 1: idea that the people of ancient Italy vacations. Yeah, but
10:54
Speaker 1: apparently it's the thing. And even Nero is said to
10:57
Speaker 1: maybe have had a place at Pompeii. Uh, And I
11:00
Speaker 1: guess it's just you know, the weather here is lovely.
11:02
Speaker 1: There's wine and olive oil everywhere. Like I said, that
11:06
Speaker 1: big theater they built that and said, one day Pink
11:08
Speaker 1: Floyd shall play here. Man, I watched that Echoes video
11:12
Speaker 1: like ten times while I was researching this. It's pretty cool.
11:15
Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know, Pink Floyd did
11:17
Speaker 1: a very famous live concert, um, well not a concert
11:22
Speaker 1: concert for no one, a live performance um in front
11:27
Speaker 1: of whatever fifteen crew people that were filming it. Yeah,
11:31
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Amphitheater at POMPEII. Yeah it's
11:33
Speaker 1: a little trippy, Yeah, just a dad um. But then
11:37
Speaker 1: David Gilmour uh a couple of years ago, I think
11:40
Speaker 1: in two thousand and sixteen did a show there with
11:43
Speaker 1: actual people there and it was the first like attended
11:48
Speaker 1: concert event there since you know the Volcano Incante. Really
11:52
Speaker 1: cool since the v I. Yeah, but and that also
11:55
Speaker 1: is will kind of see in a little while. That
11:57
Speaker 1: really gives away like just how accessible POMPEII is, the excavated,
12:03
Speaker 1: ruined city. Um that you could go see a David
12:06
Speaker 1: Gilmour concert there. Yeah. Um, like I said, wine and
12:12
Speaker 1: olive oil was kind of one of the main trades.
12:14
Speaker 1: But it was just a very rich farmland area because
12:18
Speaker 1: that volcanic soil is so rich in nutrients. And they
12:22
Speaker 1: were right there by the water with the Sarno River
12:26
Speaker 1: and then right there on the bay, and they just
12:29
Speaker 1: like life live in life there was pretty good and
12:33
Speaker 1: even the slaves apparently could earn money and potentially even
12:37
Speaker 1: by their freedom, which was pretty unusual. Um. I have
12:40
Speaker 1: to say, also, you mean and I went to Pompeii,
12:43
Speaker 1: as I've told you, and I can attest about that
12:46
Speaker 1: that farmland and the fertility of it. They have lemons,
12:50
Speaker 1: no joke, the size of your head, like they look
12:54
Speaker 1: like you shouldn't. You shouldn't stand too close to them.
12:57
Speaker 1: What do you do with that much? I don't, I
12:59
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm mean make lemonade, I guess if you're
13:01
Speaker 1: an optimist. Yeah, but it's just like you get one
13:05
Speaker 1: lemon and you've really got fourteen lemons pretty much all right.
13:09
Speaker 1: I think you're just slowly but surely cut away at it,
13:13
Speaker 1: squeeze it into your face, pick up another piece, do
13:16
Speaker 1: it again. Got you should we take a break. I
13:22
Speaker 1: think that we weren't ready for a break yet until
13:25
Speaker 1: that last joke, and now we are. Okay, So yeah,
13:27
Speaker 1: all right, we'll be back right after this and talk
13:30
Speaker 1: a little bit about the v I as watch my
13:35
Speaker 1: sk sk but you should know I sk alright, Chuck,
13:56
Speaker 1: what is the v I? The volcano incidet okay, I
14:01
Speaker 1: didn't realize it had been abbreviated, or the big one.
14:05
Speaker 1: That's a good one too, So let's go with the
14:08
Speaker 1: let's go with the b oh Okay. So um Pompey,
14:12
Speaker 1: it's this nice driving city of twenty thousands. It's a
14:15
Speaker 1: resort area to um and on. I guess the morning
14:20
Speaker 1: of August, and we should say that date is actually
14:25
Speaker 1: up for debate. Well sure, I guess we'll talk about
14:27
Speaker 1: it a little more later, but we're going with August
14:29
Speaker 1: because that's the date that's still in use. Um. There
14:33
Speaker 1: was a rumble from Vesuvius. There was an earthquake in
14:36
Speaker 1: the area enough to like get everybody's attention. But supposedly
14:40
Speaker 1: that wasn't a very infrequent occurrence. That that Vesuvius caused
14:44
Speaker 1: earthquakes pretty pretty frequently in the region, and it wasn't
14:48
Speaker 1: a big cause of panic. Yeah, Like one reason so
14:51
Speaker 1: many people died because I think because they were used
14:54
Speaker 1: to that kind of activity and they were like, man,
14:56
Speaker 1: a big deal. We're used to the earth moving under
14:58
Speaker 1: our feet. No reason to to flee the town, right,
15:01
Speaker 1: There have been a pretty substantial earthquake sixteen years before,
15:05
Speaker 1: and I think sixty three ce Um where they had
15:09
Speaker 1: to reconstruct a lot of stuff like entire temples and
15:12
Speaker 1: things have been knocked down. So I'm sure they were like,
15:15
Speaker 1: that's nothing compared to Old sixty three, the quake of
15:18
Speaker 1: sixty three. Yeah. Yeah, and they also, um, they weren't
15:23
Speaker 1: panicked because they the previous eruptions no one really knew about.
15:29
Speaker 1: There were no records of those. There wasn't even they
15:32
Speaker 1: didn't even say volcano. There wasn't a word for volcano,
15:35
Speaker 1: so it wasn't really on their radar as Hey, this
15:39
Speaker 1: thing has happened before on a grand scale. Uh. They
15:43
Speaker 1: were just kind of enjoying their life. Yeah. There weren't
15:45
Speaker 1: cartoons back then to be like that's a cartoonishly volcanic volcano,
15:49
Speaker 1: that's right, So they that's kind of ironic too that
15:53
Speaker 1: they didn't realize that there was a long history of
15:55
Speaker 1: volcanic activity there because it turns out that modern volcanologists
15:59
Speaker 1: in gall just an archaeologist, are pretty sure that there
16:03
Speaker 1: are plenty of human settlements that were covered over by
16:07
Speaker 1: the volcano, and that by the time Pompeii was built,
16:10
Speaker 1: it was built atop these old settlements that have been
16:13
Speaker 1: covered over. So it's like lost city thanks to the volcano.
16:17
Speaker 1: Everybody forgets. Somebody's like, oh, this is a nice area,
16:20
Speaker 1: will come build here, covered over by volcano. Everybody forgets
16:23
Speaker 1: in the cycle repeats again, and that's where Pompeii found
16:26
Speaker 1: itself and by s and so on this day the
16:32
Speaker 1: earth rumbles And I want to direct you to this
16:36
Speaker 1: really great website called open Culture and just search Destruction
16:39
Speaker 1: of Pompeii Open Culture and they have a video it's
16:42
Speaker 1: like eight minutes long, which is basically like a It's
16:45
Speaker 1: like they placed a camera in the c g I
16:47
Speaker 1: world of um Pompeii just and trained it on Vesuvius
16:53
Speaker 1: and left it running for twenty four hours. And um,
16:56
Speaker 1: it really gets to point across of how destructive this
16:59
Speaker 1: this would have been. Yeah, I think we I think
17:02
Speaker 1: you shouted that very same thing out on super volcanoes
17:04
Speaker 1: had to have. It's a really cool video. If you
17:07
Speaker 1: have you seen it yet, Yeah, yeah, I saw it
17:09
Speaker 1: after you shouted it out. Yeah. I watched it again
17:12
Speaker 1: this morning. And I think just from researching all of
17:15
Speaker 1: this stuff, that really drove at home even more. It
17:17
Speaker 1: was kind of unsettling to watch this time, you know
17:20
Speaker 1: for sure. So uh, a little afternoon on is when this, um,
17:27
Speaker 1: when this when the champagne cork popped. Uh. And they
17:32
Speaker 1: were not ready for this. Uh, like we said, just
17:35
Speaker 1: because of all the aforementioned reasons. Um. And the only
17:39
Speaker 1: account or one of the only accounts we have is
17:42
Speaker 1: we've talked about plenty of the elder and his nephew,
17:45
Speaker 1: plenty the younger before. Uh, they were not there. They
17:49
Speaker 1: were in my see Him, which is not too far away.
17:54
Speaker 1: It was on the northwestern edge of the Bay of Naples,
17:56
Speaker 1: but that's where plenty of the Elder was stationed. And
17:59
Speaker 1: then plenty of the younger and his mom were there
18:00
Speaker 1: as well. Uh. And apparently when this started to go down, UM,
18:05
Speaker 1: plenty of the elder got a message from a friend saying, hey,
18:08
Speaker 1: can you come and get me? It's going down, And
18:12
Speaker 1: he took off to go and plenty the younger was like, no,
18:15
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stay here, which was a pretty smart move. Yeah.
18:18
Speaker 1: And and what's how do you pronounce that town? I
18:21
Speaker 1: never tried my scene him is there right? Okay? So
18:26
Speaker 1: he and his mom were there, and it's not really close.
18:29
Speaker 1: I mean, as far as like Pompeii is concerned, Pompey
18:33
Speaker 1: is way closer to Vesuvius than mycene him is. But
18:36
Speaker 1: they still had an extremely harrowing um experience there on
18:41
Speaker 1: mycene him too, just from the fallout from Vesuvius um,
18:45
Speaker 1: even though Pompeii and Herculaneum and um uh Stabbia all
18:50
Speaker 1: got the worst of it um plenty. The younger's account,
18:54
Speaker 1: it's the only firsthand account of the eruption of Vesuvius. Then, um,
18:59
Speaker 1: it's pretty scary stuff. Like he says, like the sky
19:03
Speaker 1: went dark, but not dark, like the moon wasn't out,
19:06
Speaker 1: or there weren't any stars. He said, it suddenly got
19:08
Speaker 1: dark like somebody put a light out in an enclosed room,
19:11
Speaker 1: like that kind of dark, like apparently you couldn't see
19:14
Speaker 1: people just a few feet ahead of you. They just
19:17
Speaker 1: got real dark, real fast. Yeah, And you can you
19:19
Speaker 1: can read his entire account online but here's another nice
19:23
Speaker 1: pull quote. You could hear the shrieks of women, the
19:25
Speaker 1: wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. There were
19:28
Speaker 1: some who prayed for death. In their terror of dying,
19:31
Speaker 1: many besought the aid of the gods. But still more
19:33
Speaker 1: imagine there were no gods left, and that the universe
19:36
Speaker 1: was plunged into eternal darkness forever more. It's pretty grim, geez.
19:41
Speaker 1: So this is again in Massini Um. I think I'm
19:45
Speaker 1: not saying that right still seen him, my seeing him um.
19:49
Speaker 1: And Pompeii the situation is much much, much worse. And
19:53
Speaker 1: Pliny the Younger was saying that they were kind of
19:55
Speaker 1: huddled in I think a house or something somewhere. But
19:58
Speaker 1: even in this house, the ash that was like accumulating
20:01
Speaker 1: around them and on top of them was so much
20:03
Speaker 1: that they had to stand up every once in a
20:05
Speaker 1: while and shake it off. It was again much worse
20:08
Speaker 1: in Pompeii itself. There's a lot of ash falling and
20:11
Speaker 1: covering people inside their houses and under structures, and either
20:16
Speaker 1: you stay there and start to worry about getting buried,
20:19
Speaker 1: or even worse, you start to worry about the roof
20:22
Speaker 1: collapsing under the weight of all that gathering ash and pummice,
20:26
Speaker 1: or you risk going out and being hit by one
20:29
Speaker 1: of those pummice rocks, which if you've ever picked up
20:32
Speaker 1: a volcanic rock, it is way lighter because it's very porous,
20:35
Speaker 1: way lighter than a like a sedimentary rock of the
20:39
Speaker 1: same size. But you still wouldn't want to get hit
20:42
Speaker 1: in the head by one of those things after it's
20:44
Speaker 1: falling twenty miles out of the sky. And this is
20:47
Speaker 1: actually what they think. Um the height that this ejective
20:50
Speaker 1: coming out of the volcano reached was twenty miles or
20:53
Speaker 1: something like thirty two kilometers, I think. Yeah, So here's
20:57
Speaker 1: here's a couple of stats for you. Um ash was
21:00
Speaker 1: falling at a rate of about six inches an hour,
21:04
Speaker 1: which is you know, that's if you imagine that as rain,
21:07
Speaker 1: and if you've ever seen a rain like that, that's
21:09
Speaker 1: an unbelievable amount of rain. So imagine that is Ashu
21:13
Speaker 1: lava was flowing at about sixty eight miles an hour
21:17
Speaker 1: by the time it started sailing down the hillside right right.
21:21
Speaker 1: So so you've got a few things. You've got the
21:23
Speaker 1: first explosion, the eruption, where like you said, the court
21:26
Speaker 1: goes off the ejective goes into the air. Pliny described
21:30
Speaker 1: it as like a great pine tree with a big
21:32
Speaker 1: long trunk, and then way up high it branches out,
21:35
Speaker 1: and those are now called pliny in eruptions um. And
21:39
Speaker 1: then later on from all this activity, the the cone
21:44
Speaker 1: of the volcano collapses, and when that happened, it shot
21:49
Speaker 1: out this pyroclastic flow, which is made up of ash
21:52
Speaker 1: and hot gas. From between. I think I saw four
21:56
Speaker 1: hundred to fift hundred degrees fahrenheight, which is um a
22:00
Speaker 1: substantial amount in celsius too. That's the that's the that's
22:06
Speaker 1: the translation. And um, it's it's like you said, flowing.
22:11
Speaker 1: I saw a hundred miles an hour. You saw sixty
22:13
Speaker 1: three mile. But I mean that's one of those that's
22:16
Speaker 1: one of those things that I'm sure you know they
22:18
Speaker 1: can't really tell exactly, but at any rate that it's
22:21
Speaker 1: going to be super fast, super fast, super hot. And
22:25
Speaker 1: they think now, before they thought that everybody in Pompeii
22:29
Speaker 1: died from being covered in ash um, they think now
22:32
Speaker 1: that they actually died much more quickly than that, right
22:34
Speaker 1: when that priorro clastic flow was anywhere near them, especially
22:38
Speaker 1: when it overtook them, it would have killed them instantly,
22:41
Speaker 1: which actually is we'll see accounts for some of the
22:43
Speaker 1: faces that we've have been found around on the people
22:46
Speaker 1: of the Pompeii victims. Yeah, and they even think and
22:51
Speaker 1: by the way, we went right past the fact that
22:53
Speaker 1: Pyrochastic Flow is a great, great band name, it really is.
22:57
Speaker 1: Uh but they even think out that most of them
23:01
Speaker 1: died from head injuries even before that even happened. Oh really,
23:05
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen that one. Yeah, well we'll get to that.
23:07
Speaker 1: I'll just throw that out there as a tease. Uh.
23:11
Speaker 1: So this is shortly after midnight is when herculan a
23:15
Speaker 1: Um was covered and obliterated. About six thirty a m.
23:19
Speaker 1: The following morning is when Pompeii started getting hit with
23:22
Speaker 1: this flow. The whole thing takes about twenty five hours
23:27
Speaker 1: for all, for about two plus square miles to get
23:31
Speaker 1: completely destroyed. Yeah, and it in nineteen hours. It shot
23:36
Speaker 1: out something like one cubic mile of rock and ash
23:41
Speaker 1: out of that volcano. A cubic mile. Imagine looking up
23:44
Speaker 1: and seeing a mile cube and it's just all coming
23:49
Speaker 1: down on you. Well and again seeing this and not
23:52
Speaker 1: like not even knowing what a volcano is yeah, that
23:56
Speaker 1: it makes it anything scarier, I guess. But they must
23:59
Speaker 1: have thought the world was ending. Well yeah, I mean
24:02
Speaker 1: if they thought there were no more gods, I would
24:04
Speaker 1: guess that that that they would think like, well, this
24:06
Speaker 1: is it, this is the end of mill house um. Uh.
24:10
Speaker 1: Plenty of the younger two wrote about uh about the water,
24:14
Speaker 1: the sea retreating as I pushed by the earthquakes. And
24:17
Speaker 1: so the thought now is is that it also caused
24:21
Speaker 1: a tsunami at the climax of this eruption. So now
24:24
Speaker 1: imagine you know, the Bay of Naples flowing inland while
24:30
Speaker 1: all of this destruction is raining down around you, right, yeah,
24:33
Speaker 1: and then you definitely think the world is ending. There's
24:36
Speaker 1: actually there's a very famous beach at Herculaneum, uh where
24:40
Speaker 1: there's a lot of there were a lot of bodies found,
24:43
Speaker 1: and there's a thirty foot boat that was just kind
24:46
Speaker 1: of like jammed up against them. And I guess that
24:48
Speaker 1: would have been from the tsunami. It would have brought
24:50
Speaker 1: it in well. And that's apparently just to finish up
24:54
Speaker 1: with Plenty of the elder he did initially he was
24:57
Speaker 1: going to go out in a big boat and kind
24:59
Speaker 1: of just had a better look at what was going on.
25:02
Speaker 1: But when he got this message from his friends saying, hey,
25:04
Speaker 1: come rescue us. Uh, he got in a fast boat,
25:08
Speaker 1: a fast sailing cutter, and which is probably was his
25:12
Speaker 1: end because by the time they got there, the winds
25:15
Speaker 1: were blowing in a weird direction apparently, Uh, the way
25:18
Speaker 1: they usually blow it would have blown a lot of
25:20
Speaker 1: this out to sea, but unusually it was blowing in
25:23
Speaker 1: in the opposite direction that day. So a lot of
25:25
Speaker 1: things kind of came together for you know, the worst
25:28
Speaker 1: possible scenario. But um, so plenty of the elder gets nearby.
25:32
Speaker 1: I think, um they landed at uh pompa pompa neanis
25:38
Speaker 1: I think it was at Stabbia. Oh where plenty of
25:41
Speaker 1: the Elder landed. Yeah, his friend was pomp pomp Panius.
25:45
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, that was who's going to
25:47
Speaker 1: rescue and Pompannius was at Stabbia, this little super ultra
25:53
Speaker 1: wealthy resort area. Yeah. So, uh they couldn't get out
25:58
Speaker 1: of there basically because of their I think their boat
26:00
Speaker 1: was so light and it kept pushing them back in
26:04
Speaker 1: and um apparently said hey, let's write it out here.
26:08
Speaker 1: That's our only choice, and he was he basically died.
26:12
Speaker 1: They couldn't get him up in the theory for a
26:14
Speaker 1: while that is that he died of inhaling toxic fumes.
26:18
Speaker 1: But now modern historians and scientists are saying, no, he
26:23
Speaker 1: was fat and kind of old and out of shape
26:26
Speaker 1: and he died of a heart attack. Yeah. I think
26:28
Speaker 1: the consensus among historians today is that he was boss
26:32
Speaker 1: hog esque. Yes, good way to put it. Yeah, so
26:37
Speaker 1: that's a that's a not a good end for Pliny
26:40
Speaker 1: the Elder, But um, that's kind of cool to be
26:43
Speaker 1: able to say, like, yeah, I died at Pompeii? Is it?
26:47
Speaker 1: I was a super famous dude in the Roman world,
26:49
Speaker 1: And where did I find my end? Pompeii another famous
26:52
Speaker 1: thing in the Roman world. That's how you'd say that
26:54
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's neat. So Pliny
26:58
Speaker 1: the Elder died. Pliny the Younger lived, though, and we
27:01
Speaker 1: know about all of this because again, he was an eyewitness.
27:04
Speaker 1: He was also a historian, a statesman, just all around
27:08
Speaker 1: smart dude. But he didn't write his um his letter
27:13
Speaker 1: to Tacitus the Historian for like twenty seven years after
27:18
Speaker 1: the fact, and so um, yeah, I don't know if
27:21
Speaker 1: he just heard Testitus was getting a history together and
27:24
Speaker 1: he wanted to contribute, or what what the what the
27:27
Speaker 1: difference was, or what the deal was with the gap.
27:29
Speaker 1: But there is a lot of um there's a lot
27:33
Speaker 1: of disagreement about whether his date of August is the
27:37
Speaker 1: correct one. The reason everyone says August twenty is because
27:41
Speaker 1: he wrote that in the letter, he said that this
27:43
Speaker 1: happened on August twenty four. The thing is, apparently there
27:46
Speaker 1: are other drafts of his letter, that same letter that
27:49
Speaker 1: either didn't give the date or gave a different date
27:51
Speaker 1: later on, I think of November twenty. And then there's
27:54
Speaker 1: a lot of actual circumstantial evidence that suggests that this
27:58
Speaker 1: actually took place either on October or November twenty four
28:03
Speaker 1: rather than August. So there's things like there was a
28:06
Speaker 1: there was a just an inordinate amount of pomegranates and
28:11
Speaker 1: figs and nuts found around the town, which would suggest
28:15
Speaker 1: that the harvest had just happened the autumn harvest, which
28:18
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have done in August. Uh, there's a coin
28:22
Speaker 1: that that had a um a title of Caesar that
28:26
Speaker 1: wasn't bestowed until September of seventy nine. So that coin, Yeah,
28:31
Speaker 1: that coin shouldn't have existed. There's there's all this evidence
28:34
Speaker 1: that's coming together that says no, it actually probably was
28:38
Speaker 1: either October November, but it's just been August for so
28:43
Speaker 1: long now that it's going to be another ten twenty
28:46
Speaker 1: years before everybody's like it happened in October November. Yeah,
28:51
Speaker 1: and truth be told, that's sort of one of those
28:54
Speaker 1: things that wonky archaeologists would argue over. I hear it,
28:59
Speaker 1: and I think, what's a couple of months really, you know,
29:01
Speaker 1: but I just think it's it's it's really fascinating that
29:05
Speaker 1: that they found a coin and they said, Okay, this
29:08
Speaker 1: coin shouldn't exist. And the reason why because because there
29:11
Speaker 1: was um there was a like Britain was conquered by
29:14
Speaker 1: the Romans a little around like around that time, and
29:18
Speaker 1: so they minted a coin to honor that. And because
29:21
Speaker 1: that coin shows up and POMPEII we can date when
29:25
Speaker 1: Vesuvius erupted more accurately. That to me is it's just
29:29
Speaker 1: eye popping, like look at my eyes, good old fashioned
29:33
Speaker 1: police work. So either one so Vesuvius has spoken, Pompeii
29:39
Speaker 1: is now gone, it's covered in something like um. I
29:42
Speaker 1: believe ten meters, like about thirty ft of ash and pummice. Yeah,
29:48
Speaker 1: I've seen all kinds of anywhere from like eight to
29:51
Speaker 1: thirty ft, so a lot of feet. So it's covered
29:54
Speaker 1: up a lot. And I don't know if we said
29:56
Speaker 1: this or not, but Um, of the twenty people, about
29:59
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand of those residents left when there was the
30:03
Speaker 1: first sign of trouble, because again Vesuvius gave plenty of warning.
30:06
Speaker 1: But there were about two thousand people in the town
30:08
Speaker 1: of Pompeii itself when Vesuvius went off and covered the town.
30:12
Speaker 1: But now it's everything's calm, it's quiet, Vesuvius is quiet again,
30:17
Speaker 1: and Pompeii Herculaneum stabia a plantas they're gone. Yeah, I
30:23
Speaker 1: think about twenty total people in the region died, that
30:28
Speaker 1: is what I saw. Oh really that many? Huh? Yeah,
30:30
Speaker 1: among that, you know, the two square miles. So so
30:34
Speaker 1: this the whole area has just been radically changed. Um.
30:39
Speaker 1: And there these cities were so lost that even the
30:43
Speaker 1: people who stayed in the area and continued to live there,
30:46
Speaker 1: they lost track of exactly where Pompeii was and they
30:48
Speaker 1: stopped talking about it. Eventually. There's another city named Pompei
30:52
Speaker 1: that was founded many many years later. That's the modern Pompeii.
30:56
Speaker 1: And if they ever even referenced Pompeii, they just called
30:59
Speaker 1: it uh Chi Vita the city, and they just knew
31:03
Speaker 1: that there was a lost city somewhere in the area.
31:05
Speaker 1: And that's how things stayed for about the next um
31:08
Speaker 1: sevent d years. That's right, And you want to take
31:12
Speaker 1: a break, yes, all right, Well we'll get into the
31:16
Speaker 1: discovery of Pompeii after this. Skaw large sk All right, dude,
31:41
Speaker 1: we're back, that's right. So what we've got here as
31:45
Speaker 1: far as Roman history pre Pompeii and post Pompeii, UH,
31:51
Speaker 1: is they've focused a lot on um what they would
31:54
Speaker 1: call the important people of society, so military stuff, wealthy people,
32:00
Speaker 1: political stuff. They didn't say, like, hey, maybe be valuable
32:04
Speaker 1: to record what it's like for um, everyday people of
32:07
Speaker 1: Rome because they didn't care. That's why Pompeii and the
32:11
Speaker 1: the rediscovery and the excavation over the years has been
32:14
Speaker 1: so important is because all of these a lot of
32:18
Speaker 1: these people and in the shops and all the homes
32:21
Speaker 1: and the art were really well preserved. Uh. Once they
32:24
Speaker 1: started digging into this stuff, which was a pretty remarkable
32:28
Speaker 1: flind and continues to be. Yeah. Plus, um, Rome has
32:32
Speaker 1: was around for so long. It has been around for
32:35
Speaker 1: so long that it evolved, right, So over time, what
32:39
Speaker 1: Rome once was culturally historically um is kind of lost
32:45
Speaker 1: and replaced as the culture itself evolves in ages. And
32:49
Speaker 1: apparently it grew more and more conservative the longer it
32:52
Speaker 1: was around. And one of the things that Pompey also
32:55
Speaker 1: gives us that the snapshot of Roman culture before it
32:58
Speaker 1: became conservative, and it was hyper sexual at the time
33:03
Speaker 1: when Pompeii was covered over. So that was another thing
33:05
Speaker 1: because at the time, until Pompeii was discovered, um, everyone
33:09
Speaker 1: considered Rome, ancient Rome as this very staid, conservative civilization.
33:16
Speaker 1: And then they started to discover this stuff from pompeign
33:18
Speaker 1: and we're like, whoa, what were these people into back then? Yeah,
33:21
Speaker 1: there was a lot of highly erotic art. Yeah, I
33:25
Speaker 1: saw a statue of the god pan having graphics sex
33:29
Speaker 1: with a goat, like a pretty pretty realistic statue. And
33:34
Speaker 1: they found that they dug that out of Pompey pretty
33:37
Speaker 1: early on. And there's phalluses they found everywhere. Some people
33:41
Speaker 1: put fallacies on their houses, like sticking out into the street. Um,
33:46
Speaker 1: there was pre Apiss, which is a lesser god who
33:49
Speaker 1: um was extraordinarily unsettlingly well endowed. Um, there was just
33:56
Speaker 1: a lot of fertility stuff and a lot of just
33:59
Speaker 1: explicit sex reality in their in their artwork back then.
34:02
Speaker 1: And Rome eventually moved on past that, and it had
34:06
Speaker 1: been forgotten until POMPEII, you know, gave up its secrets. Yeah,
34:10
Speaker 1: so uh, kind of immediately afterward up until about the
34:16
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds throughout and like I said, like you said,
34:19
Speaker 1: it was kind of forgotten for a little while. But
34:21
Speaker 1: during this whole long period of time, POMPEII was kind
34:25
Speaker 1: of essentially rated again and again by either um, you know,
34:31
Speaker 1: people hunting for valuables or kings and queens who wanted
34:36
Speaker 1: to plunder things, you know, like statues and stuff for
34:39
Speaker 1: their own palaces. And this sort of happened again and
34:43
Speaker 1: again throughout history until about the eighteen hundreds, when like
34:48
Speaker 1: legit archaeology really started to happen where they could go
34:52
Speaker 1: in there with the name and actually preserving some of
34:54
Speaker 1: this stuff. Yeah. I think the earliest ones were the king,
34:58
Speaker 1: the Bourbon King Charles the who it was discovered under
35:02
Speaker 1: his watch in seventeen forty eight, and then the French
35:05
Speaker 1: came into the area, and by this time they were
35:08
Speaker 1: crazy about archaeology thanks to their fascination with Egypt, so
35:12
Speaker 1: they brought in some pretty good practices. But even still,
35:15
Speaker 1: I mean, compared to what archaeologists know and do today,
35:19
Speaker 1: this is pretty hokey, basic backward archaeological methodology. Yeah. Like
35:24
Speaker 1: even when they started to do it right, Uh, they
35:28
Speaker 1: just weren't as advance as we are today. Um. But
35:31
Speaker 1: things kind of change for the better when a man
35:34
Speaker 1: named Giuseppe B. Fiorelli came along in eighteen sixty and
35:38
Speaker 1: he said, hey, I'm in charge now. UM, I'm gonna
35:41
Speaker 1: get in here and try and do it right. I'm
35:43
Speaker 1: gonna be way more careful. My team is going to
35:45
Speaker 1: be more careful. We're gonna record all the positions of people,
35:50
Speaker 1: everything that we find. And that's when it that's when
35:53
Speaker 1: it really legitimized, um kind of what was going on
35:56
Speaker 1: as far as excavation goes. Uh. And he also made
35:59
Speaker 1: his name most famously for what ended up being named
36:03
Speaker 1: after him, the Fiarelli process. Is when he saw these
36:07
Speaker 1: you know, every you know, everything is covered in ash
36:09
Speaker 1: and hardened, so they had they were basically encased in
36:13
Speaker 1: these you know, over the years, the bodies would run away,
36:16
Speaker 1: and so they were encased in these hollow cavities. The
36:18
Speaker 1: people were and dogs and you know, all sorts of animals.
36:22
Speaker 1: So he said, why don't we inject this guess, so
36:24
Speaker 1: this plaster into these cavities and see what we come
36:28
Speaker 1: up with. And what he came up with very famously,
36:30
Speaker 1: we're we're the uh well, were the people of Pompeii,
36:34
Speaker 1: like more than a thousand of them? Yeah? Do you
36:37
Speaker 1: remember our Molderrama episode that just came out. I do
36:40
Speaker 1: remember that. So when these people were covered in that
36:42
Speaker 1: ash and their bodies rotted away, it left what is
36:45
Speaker 1: effectively a mold, and he filled it with that that
36:48
Speaker 1: plaster and made plaster casts of them, right and and
36:52
Speaker 1: apparently really detailed once I saw him, But I didn't
36:55
Speaker 1: see anything as detailed as like ed Ed points out
36:58
Speaker 1: that you can see like the um the design somebody
37:02
Speaker 1: had shaved into their pubic hair. That's pretty pretty detailed
37:06
Speaker 1: plaster cast of a dead person from two thousand years ago. Um,
37:11
Speaker 1: there was you can very famously see um a man
37:15
Speaker 1: like agony on a man's face like like you was
37:18
Speaker 1: just captured at the moment of death, just basically flash
37:21
Speaker 1: frozen a lot like Hansolo and carbonite. Yeah, it was.
37:25
Speaker 1: It was a huge, huge find and it just kind
37:28
Speaker 1: of shook the world, and uh, reproductions and photos of
37:32
Speaker 1: all these casts became the sensation of the day all
37:36
Speaker 1: over the world. Um. Like I said, there's a very
37:39
Speaker 1: famous one of a dog kind of writhing in pain
37:42
Speaker 1: on his back. It's one of the more sad ones.
37:44
Speaker 1: It looked like he had a collar onto Yeah he did,
37:46
Speaker 1: which is interesting although that I've later seen where that
37:49
Speaker 1: might have been a fake, which I don't fully understand. Yeah,
37:53
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen that at all because there were no
37:54
Speaker 1: bones inside of it. Uh so they're not quite sure
37:57
Speaker 1: about that one. But um, they're just some really sad
38:00
Speaker 1: ones of like what is clearly a mother like holding
38:04
Speaker 1: her child. Um, families and couples in embrace and like
38:09
Speaker 1: horrific embrace. Uh. And it's just really kind of sad
38:12
Speaker 1: to look through these these photos and they kept finding them,
38:16
Speaker 1: like all over the place. They were just groups of
38:18
Speaker 1: people huddled. When they would excavate a house, uh, they
38:22
Speaker 1: would they would find bodies quite frequently, and like you said,
38:26
Speaker 1: like in that that that those embraces just caught in
38:29
Speaker 1: their last moment, like their literal last moment was just
38:32
Speaker 1: caught in time. So it was it was quite a
38:35
Speaker 1: fine and like you said, it really definitely caught the
38:38
Speaker 1: imagination of the rest of the world. Um. So much
38:41
Speaker 1: so that there was like a Greek neo classical revival
38:45
Speaker 1: in the Enlightenment period because everyone had Pompey fever when
38:49
Speaker 1: it was discovered Pompey fever. Pompey fever catch it. So
38:54
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, I guess a few years
38:57
Speaker 1: ago now, a group did CTS scans on some of
39:01
Speaker 1: these casts about I think thirty or forty of them
39:04
Speaker 1: and that dog and that bore uh, and they this
39:08
Speaker 1: provided just a lot more detail of um. So if
39:11
Speaker 1: like you can look at the casts and then look
39:13
Speaker 1: at the ct scan and it kind of brings it
39:15
Speaker 1: to life. Uh. And they found it revealed a few
39:18
Speaker 1: really interesting things. UM. One is that the people of
39:21
Speaker 1: Pompeii had almost perfect teeth, which had been really unusual
39:26
Speaker 1: at the time. And they think it's because they ate
39:28
Speaker 1: a lot of fruits and vegetables, very little sugar and
39:31
Speaker 1: that the water was heavily fluoridated, so they all had
39:35
Speaker 1: really like nice straight teeth. Um. And then what I
39:39
Speaker 1: was talking about the head injuries. This is there's an
39:41
Speaker 1: article in the Atlantic called How the People of Pompei
39:43
Speaker 1: Really Died, And almost all of these CT scans revealed
39:48
Speaker 1: that they had head injuries from getting you know, smashed
39:51
Speaker 1: in the head from this volcanic rock. What a way
39:55
Speaker 1: to go. Yeah, although I guess it would be quick right. Well,
39:58
Speaker 1: either way, even if it's that, or if it's um
40:02
Speaker 1: what you were saying, it's not the slow suffocating death
40:06
Speaker 1: that they used to think it was. Yeah, which is
40:08
Speaker 1: way better. Um. I saw also check there was an
40:12
Speaker 1: excavation of like a latrine, I guess, and and just
40:16
Speaker 1: a normal housing block where poor people or middle class
40:20
Speaker 1: workers would have lived. And um, they found evidence of
40:24
Speaker 1: really great diets. And they think that the people that Pompeii,
40:28
Speaker 1: the rich people actually probably ate a little worse because
40:31
Speaker 1: they ate slightly richer food. But everyone there, including the
40:36
Speaker 1: lower classes, were very like well fed on very healthy foods,
40:39
Speaker 1: basically like the Mediterranean diet like you think of today. Um.
40:43
Speaker 1: And that they were also taller on average than the
40:48
Speaker 1: citizens of the area today. Interesting. Yeah, it's usually the
40:52
Speaker 1: exact opposite if you think about it. You know, George
40:54
Speaker 1: Washington four ft tall. Everybody knows that they also found
41:00
Speaker 1: in some of the um I think the runoff into
41:03
Speaker 1: the drainage systems or something they found. You know, you
41:06
Speaker 1: were talking about the rich people eating um more exotic meats.
41:10
Speaker 1: They found evidence at the eight Sea urchin. So I'll
41:13
Speaker 1: give him that because people eat that flamingo had and
41:17
Speaker 1: seen that one. I know it's coming there. Giraffe. Yeah,
41:22
Speaker 1: who looks at a giraffe and says, I wonder what
41:25
Speaker 1: that tastes like? And then does it follows through on it?
41:28
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's the following through part that really
41:31
Speaker 1: knocks my socks off. So those are some recent excavations, right, yeah,
41:36
Speaker 1: I mean this is the kind of stuff that has
41:38
Speaker 1: come out with things like DNA analysis. Okay, so so
41:42
Speaker 1: this is extraordinarily new as far as Pompey goes. Pompeii
41:47
Speaker 1: is it's really cool because it's got its ancient history
41:50
Speaker 1: when it was covered over by Vesuvius, but then it
41:53
Speaker 1: also has a secondary history of its discovery, and then
41:56
Speaker 1: it's it's excavations since then, and apparently it's the longest
42:01
Speaker 1: continuously excavated site in the world as far as archaeology goes.
42:08
Speaker 1: I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised. It is extraordinarily big.
42:11
Speaker 1: Um and the the fact that it's been around for
42:15
Speaker 1: so long, it's been excavated for so long, it was
42:17
Speaker 1: basically there when archaeology was born. Archaeological techniques that have
42:23
Speaker 1: been developed over the age have all been tried and
42:26
Speaker 1: tested and frequently discarded at Pompeii UH And as a result,
42:31
Speaker 1: a lot of those early ones that were just just
42:34
Speaker 1: not very smart have actually had a They've had a
42:38
Speaker 1: pretty tough effect on the town. Like um, the frescoes.
42:42
Speaker 1: They discovered frescoes, which are paintings on plaster walls all
42:46
Speaker 1: over the town. Most houses had really beautiful frescoes, and
42:50
Speaker 1: the workers were like, well, these are going to flake off.
42:53
Speaker 1: This is back in the nineties, so we need to
42:55
Speaker 1: we need to do something. So they covered him in
42:58
Speaker 1: paraffin wax, which I guess it makes sense. It's covered
43:02
Speaker 1: in wax. We can figure out what to do with
43:03
Speaker 1: it later. Maybe we never will, but you can still
43:06
Speaker 1: kind of see through it. The problem is that the
43:09
Speaker 1: pigments bonded to the wax, not just rubbed off, like
43:13
Speaker 1: molecularly bonded with the wax. And then as water grew
43:19
Speaker 1: behind the walls and seeped through the walls behind the painting,
43:23
Speaker 1: it pushed the painting off the walls onto the wax.
43:26
Speaker 1: So now if you want to get this wax off,
43:28
Speaker 1: they finally developed a technique where you can use a
43:32
Speaker 1: laser that just removes the wax and leaves the pigment.
43:35
Speaker 1: But um, that's extraordinarily new to I think just in
43:38
Speaker 1: the last couple of years they started using that. Before
43:40
Speaker 1: then they would do things like use gasoline and stuff
43:42
Speaker 1: to get the wax off and it would just take
43:44
Speaker 1: the fresco clean off. Yeah, I'm surprised there's anything left
43:48
Speaker 1: between being continually rated um, earthquakes since then, World War Two,
43:56
Speaker 1: since then, vandals, tourists, rainwater. Uh, it's just like it's
44:02
Speaker 1: been just beaten up for thousands, you know, like a
44:05
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years now, but there's like you've been there,
44:08
Speaker 1: there's still a lot of stuff there. Yeah, there is.
44:10
Speaker 1: I think they they've uncovered two thirds of it, they think,
44:15
Speaker 1: and so they've gotten to this point now where they're like, okay,
44:17
Speaker 1: wait a minute, wait a minute. I think in the
44:19
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, whoever was the director of archaeology at Pompey
44:23
Speaker 1: said we need to stop excavating. We're gonna leave the
44:27
Speaker 1: what's left for later generations who have better techniques to
44:31
Speaker 1: to uncover, and we're going to focus on preserving what's
44:34
Speaker 1: here now. Um, which is a big deal because it's
44:38
Speaker 1: a World Heritage site. And UNESCO basically came in in
44:41
Speaker 1: two thou thirteen and they effectively condemned it. Like what
44:45
Speaker 1: a city would do to a building that was falling down.
44:48
Speaker 1: That's what you meant new Unesco did to the Pompey site.
44:51
Speaker 1: They said, this this thing is toast. It's it's they
44:53
Speaker 1: put it on the Endanger List. Uh. And one of
44:56
Speaker 1: the big reasons is as tourists, well, while when you're there,
45:00
Speaker 1: you're like, are are you sure I'm allowed to be
45:02
Speaker 1: sitting on this thing and taking a funny picture, or
45:05
Speaker 1: I'm I'm really allowed to walk through here? They let
45:08
Speaker 1: you go almost everywhere on that site, touch everything, run around.
45:13
Speaker 1: It's it's just like a big playground basically, and you
45:16
Speaker 1: have to stop and remind yourself. Wait, this is an
45:18
Speaker 1: archaeological site in operations still and um they they the
45:25
Speaker 1: the fact that tourists have been allowed to do that
45:26
Speaker 1: for so long, it's had a huge effect on the
45:28
Speaker 1: deterioration of the site itself too. Yeah. Well not only that,
45:32
Speaker 1: but it's um, it's been corrupt over the years, the
45:37
Speaker 1: management of these ruins. Um. A lot of the structures
45:41
Speaker 1: have collapsed over time completely and gone away. And then
45:45
Speaker 1: finally in two thousand and twelve, the EU and the
45:48
Speaker 1: Italian government finally got together and said, listen, we need
45:50
Speaker 1: to really reinvest in this in this find here, and
45:54
Speaker 1: it's called the Great Pompeii Project, and they invested about
45:57
Speaker 1: a hundred hundred and five million euros to try and
46:01
Speaker 1: repair and preserve what they have left. Um. I'm surprised
46:05
Speaker 1: they haven't closed down more parts of it, because, like
46:09
Speaker 1: you said, you can still go everywhere. But what they
46:12
Speaker 1: have done is restored a lot of these frescoes and mosaics,
46:15
Speaker 1: like you were saying, Um, a lot of the best
46:18
Speaker 1: work has been done in the last five years. Yeah,
46:22
Speaker 1: easily to try and get this thing preserved as much
46:25
Speaker 1: as they can at this point. Yeah, And one of
46:27
Speaker 1: the things that got them going was the um the
46:30
Speaker 1: gladiator school, which is a pretty big structure that housed
46:33
Speaker 1: the gladiators where they trained in town. And it it crumbled,
46:37
Speaker 1: it fell, it turned into ruins um because it had
46:41
Speaker 1: gotten eroded I think by drainage. And one of the
46:44
Speaker 1: things they're figuring out now is that there was a
46:47
Speaker 1: pretty decent sewer system underneath these towns, but that pyroclastic
46:52
Speaker 1: flow covered it all up, so the water has nowhere
46:56
Speaker 1: to go but over the ruins, and over the last
46:58
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years it's eroded some of these buildings.
47:00
Speaker 1: That's another thing they're dealing with two And I don't
47:04
Speaker 1: know if you sit it up with the Herculaneum conservation project,
47:08
Speaker 1: did you mention that, uh, the Great Pompei or the
47:12
Speaker 1: Herculaneum the Herculaneum. So there's a there's like a model
47:16
Speaker 1: for for dealing with these sites, to preserve these sites,
47:19
Speaker 1: and it's in Herculaneum. It was apparently worse off than
47:22
Speaker 1: pomp Pay for a long time, and the public private
47:25
Speaker 1: partnership took control of the thing, and now it's like
47:29
Speaker 1: the model of how to how to rescue sites like this.
47:33
Speaker 1: So it's possible that Pompeii project will will be successful
47:36
Speaker 1: and in like twenty years there will probably be walkways
47:40
Speaker 1: everywhere that are raised above ground and you won't be
47:43
Speaker 1: able to touch anything. Um. I would guess if you
47:46
Speaker 1: want to be able to touch Pompey, you should go
47:49
Speaker 1: in the next few years, because I don't think they're
47:50
Speaker 1: gonna keep allowing that for much longer. If you want
47:53
Speaker 1: to touch Pompeii, if you want to touch it, do
47:56
Speaker 1: you got anything else? Well, it's Pompey, man, we did it. Fine,
48:00
Speaker 1: that's right. Okay, Well, if you want to touch pomp Pay,
48:05
Speaker 1: you should go to Pompeii. Uh. And in the meantime,
48:08
Speaker 1: while you're waiting to do that, if you should type
48:10
Speaker 1: pomp Pay into the search bar how stuffworks dot com,
48:13
Speaker 1: which we'll bring up this great article by the grap stor.
48:16
Speaker 1: And since I said graps, there's time for listener mail,
48:21
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this Artifacts and our Monuments from Germany. Hey, guys,
48:25
Speaker 1: just finish the episode on public monument removal and it
48:28
Speaker 1: was fantastic as usual. It made me think of the
48:30
Speaker 1: monument removal in other parts of the world, in particular
48:33
Speaker 1: in Germany. Comes to mind because I studied German all
48:36
Speaker 1: through high school and college to the study abroad there
48:39
Speaker 1: first summer. The way Germans treat their Nazi history is
48:42
Speaker 1: different by no means an expert, but as I understand that,
48:46
Speaker 1: they do everything in their power to prevent their citizens
48:48
Speaker 1: from idolizing or idealizing Nazi Germany. Um, you can't buy
48:52
Speaker 1: mind comp which I think that's true, isn't it. I
48:56
Speaker 1: think so. There are no statues or monuments of any kind.
48:59
Speaker 1: They're not saying tizing their history or pretending it didn't happen,
49:02
Speaker 1: but they don't want to commemorate it either anyway. In
49:06
Speaker 1: honor of today being the day the Berlin Wall has
49:08
Speaker 1: been gone longer than it was up, I'd like to
49:11
Speaker 1: recommend that you see the movie Goodbye Lenin if you
49:14
Speaker 1: haven't never seen it. It's great. It takes place when
49:16
Speaker 1: the Berlin Wall comes down in the first year or
49:18
Speaker 1: so after during German reunification. Funny and thoughtful and sad
49:22
Speaker 1: and just really really good. It's one of my favorite movies.
49:25
Speaker 1: And no spoilers, but it has my favorite scene ever
49:28
Speaker 1: of a monument being removed. UM, and I looked it up.
49:31
Speaker 1: It was I think it was nominated for Golden Globe
49:35
Speaker 1: for Best Foreign Film and a host of other like
49:38
Speaker 1: Baptis and European Awards, so it looks pretty good. Um,
49:41
Speaker 1: look forward to you in the new episodes. And that
49:43
Speaker 1: is from Ellie Nice. Thanks a lot, Ellie appreciate that email.
49:47
Speaker 1: Very thoughtful. I don't think Germany was even allowed to
49:49
Speaker 1: have a flag for a while. Um. All right, well
49:54
Speaker 1: that's it. If you want to get in touch with us,
49:57
Speaker 1: you can tweet to us s y s K podcast.
50:00
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50:02
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