Pompeii Discoveries - Essay Example

Following the discovery of the ruins, archaeologists have worked on the site to discover a city stopped in time, completely untouched by the progress of the preceding centuries and thus providing a slightly clouded impression of what life must have been like for this thriving society. Information gathered from eyewitness accounts of the incident as well as archaeological excavations have enabled us in the modern age to pinpoint just what happened on that day in 79 AD and discover a great deal of information regarding the daily life of people in the city at the time of the eruption.

The eruption that buried Pompeii was not confined to Pompeii alone, although this is the most famous of the cities that were buried. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, spilling tons of poisonous gasses, molten rock, ash and pumice into the air, this material “engulfed the surrounding area suffocating the inhabitants of the neighboring Roman resort cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae.”1 While there remains some debate about the exact date of the eruption as it compares with the archaeological evidence2, history has been provided with a first-hand account of the eruption thanks to Pliny the Younger, who had been living at his uncle’s house in Misenum when the eruption occurred and who lost his beloved uncle, Pliny the Elder, to the mountain when he stayed too long trying to rescue survivors.

According to Pliny’s account, from where he sat across the Bay of Naples, he and his family could see in the distance a great cloud forming. “Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight