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How Pompeii Worked · Stuff You Should Know

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