The Buried Cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum

Uncovered Pompeii with Mount Vesuvius in the background

It was long believed that August 24 in the year 79 was when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The eruption destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (The latter city is often left out of the story.)

Pompeii was about five miles away from the mountain. The cities are in what is now Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Pompeii was a popular resort town for Rome's wealthy and the population was about 20,000. Pompeii and Herculaneum are two of the few ancient cities to be preserved nearly intact. The ash and debris that covered the area was up to 23 feet thick in places and that protected it from looting and the elements.

Most of the residents were able to escape when noises from the volcano were heard that morning. At noon, the plume of ash, pumice rock, and debris shot up into the air and began falling on the surrounding area. Pompeii was about 5 miles from the volcano. About 5,000 people died, probably more from a blast of blistering hot, poisonous gas, rather than debris or lava. After debris fell from the initial eruption, there was already about 9 feet of ash in the streets of Pompeii but the rain of ash continued.

Herculaneum lay west of Vesuvius and it was only mildly affected by the first phase of the eruption. While roofs in Pompeii were collapsing under the weight of falling debris, only a few centimeters of ash fell on Herculaneum but it prompted most inhabitants to flee.

Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and noted that the billowing soot, rocks, and gas looked like an enormous pine tree eclipsing the sun. He wrote, "Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room."

Though he was safe across the bay, he wrote that "I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me."

It is said that the modern science of archaeology was born with the excavations of the two cities which were rediscovered in the 18th century. They were almost completely intact. About one-third of Pompeii is still buried and excavations continue today.

The date of the eruption is now thought to be on or after October 17 based on the excavation clues. For example, people buried in the ash were wearing heavier clothing than the light summer clothes typical of August. The fresh fruit and vegetables in the shops are typical of October and the summer fruit typical of August was already being sold in dried, or conserved form. Wine fermenting jars had been sealed, which would have happened around the second half of October. Coins found in the purse of a woman buried in the ash include one with a 15th imperatorial acclamation among the emperor's titles and could not have been minted before the second week of September.

The 1980–82 excavations in Herculaneum found many skeletons on the ancient beach in front of the city walls in what are called "boat sheds." It had been believed that the majority of the town's inhabitants had managed to flee because so few skeletons had been unearthed. This discovery led to a shift in perspective theorizing that the last inhabitants waiting for rescue by sea were probably killed instantly by the intense heat.

Boat sheds at the shore     Link

Could it happen again? Mount Vesuvius is still active. It last erupted in 1944, and experts believe it could erupt again at any time. But today, about 3 million people live within a few miles of the crater. About 600,000 of them live close enough to the volcano that they would not survive an eruption today. But our technology allows scientists to monitor the volcano continuously and there are plans to evacuate the area well in advance of any detected eruption.

crossposted at Weekends in Paradelle

The Tyburn Tree and Gallows

Tryptich showing martyrs who died for the Catholic faith from 1535 - 1680
In the center is the triple gallows known as the Tyburn Tree.

London's Tyburn Gallows was where the last public execution took place in 1783. Tyburn was located near the western end of what is now Oxford Street. The first execution took place there in 1196 well before the infamous "Tyburn Tree" gallows was erected.

The actual Tyburn Tree was not a tree but a gallows built with a triangular shape and that allowed multiple people to be executed at once. In 1649, 24 prisoners were hanged simultaneously. 

It was located in the middle of the roadway and actually became a tourist attraction. People traveled from towns miles away to watch the public executions. The villagers of Tyburn erected stands and charged people admission.

Not all those executed were criminals. Dr. John Story was a Catholic who refused to acknowledge Elizabeth I as the queen and head of the Church of England and was the first execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering.

This was a macabre landmark for the village of Tyburn and eventually it was taken down and executions were carried out on portable gallows. The site of public executions was later moved to Newgate Prison.

MORE

marble-arch.london/culture-blog/history-of-tyburn-tree/

atlasobscura.com/places/tyburn-tree-marker

The site of Tyburn Tree memorial

Old and Middle English

The sole surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf (British Library)

I used to teach a unit about the history of the English language. It sounds like a very academic (i.e. "boring") topic, but I think it turned out to be be more interesting than most of my students expected.

It all starts with invasions. Three Germanic tribes invade Britain during the 5th century AD. The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany.

The people of Britain spoke a Celtic language and the invaders pushed them west and north into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Which tribe dominated? Well, the Angles who came from Angleland were successful enough to give us - through some mispronunciations  of Angleland - "Englaland" later England. Their language was called "Englisc."  And most of us have heard the term Anglo-Saxon.  The Jutes, who settled in Southern Britain, didn't fare as well.

When I was in college, a professor played us recordings of Old English. I expected it to sound like Shakespeare or Chaucer, but it sounded like a foreign language. You could hear hints of German, Norse an, as I was taught, some Latin and Celtic.

Old English is the English of Beowulf, and it sounds like another language. To me it sounded more like German, with some Latin, Norse, and Celtic influences.

Listen to this brief excerpt:


Beowulf might sound like something J.R.R. Tolkien made up for his elves to speak in The Lord of the Rings.

So, we had speakers of “Old English,” “Middle English,” and “Modern English.” Shakespeare, much to my freshmen English students' disbelief, was speaking Modern English.

A few, but not that many, modern English words come from Old English. Some of them are commonly used ones like our articles, pronouns and prepositions.


That Middle English period (1100-1500) got a kickstart from William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), in 1066 when he invaded and conquered England.

These "Normans" spoke a form of French that became the language of the Royal Court, the ruling class and business classes. there was certainly a class division based on language. The lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French.

But, by the 14th century, English became dominant again, though many French words had been added. Enter Middle English.

This was the English of the poet Chaucer. A bit more understandable to us today that Old English, but still difficult - as any student who had to study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales will tell you.

Take a listen to his Prologue:


Around 1500, there is a distinct change in pronunciation (actually called "The Great Vowel Shift") with vowels being pronounced shorter. The British are much more global and connecting with other languages. Add in the Renaissance of classical learning, and the invention of printing and we get a much more common language. Books being cheaper meant more people learned to read and that led to standardization of English spelling and grammar.

The dialect of London, home of the publishing houses, was the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published.

Though the Early Modern English of Shakespeare still sounds odd to students, the big change that comes after this to late Modern English (1800+) is mostly vocabulary.

For that, we can point to the Industrial Revolution and technology which created many new words (and still does today) and at that time the British Empire was at its height globally. English was spoken around the world and also took on many words from around the world.

Here is a brief History of the English Language in 10 Animated Minutes - from the Open University

A Zealot and His Wife

I have had a long interest that is more historical than religious about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I heard Reza Aslan interviewed about his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and I knew it was a story I'd want to read.

Aslan first did a bachelor’s degree is in religious studies with a minor was in biblical Greek. He then did graduate work at Harvard University in world religions, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in the sociology of religions. He also has an MFA from the University of Iowa.


In this story from 2000 years ago, we follow an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker who walked across Galilee and gathered around him followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.”

He is a revolutionary. His movement threatened the established order. Like others of his time, he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

What first caught my interest in Aslan's interview was that his disillusionment with the Bible stories grew as he studied them because of the inconsistencies of the stories told in the gospels, both those we know "officially" and others including the gnostic gospels.

The book puts Jesus back into his era. This first-century Palestine was filled with many Jewish prophets, preachers, would-be messiahs, miracle workers and magicians. It was the age of zealotry, which was a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews.

The entire story is filled with contradictions. Jesus was a man of peace who told his followers to arm themselves with swords. He gave public displays of exorcisms and healings, but told his disciples to keep his identity a secret.

But the early Christian church portrayed Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary.

In another book, No god but God , Reza Aslan explains Islam. That is a topic that is also ancient but certainly is highly topical now. 

My reading of his books and further online searching led me to discover stories of "Jesus’s Wife." Though it sounds like a chapter from The Da Vinci Code, Aslan also discusses in Zealot  the women who followed Jesus.

Was Jesus Christ married to one of them? A scrap of manuscript suggests that he had a wife.

“The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus  (Karen L. King / Harvard / AP)

It is a 1300-year-old scrap of papyrus that has the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” It is written in the ancient language of Coptic.

When the Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented the papyrus in 2012 at a conference in Rome, it caused a lot of interest and controversy. And the controversey seems to still be ongoing.

No manuscripts before had mentioned Jesus being married. The scrap of writing suggested that the complete manuscript might describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife” was “worthy” of also being a disciple.

Was that woman Mary Magdalene? Aslan says that for a Jewish man of that time not to be married when he was in his thiries would have been very unusual. Jesus’ marriage would have been arranged by his parents, probably between his 16th and 30th birthdays. In rabbinic literature the age of twenty is given as the upper limit of marriage, and it was especially important for aspiring teachers and religious leaders.

portion of da Vinci's Last Supper

In The Da Vinci Code book and movie, the suggestion that sets the book in motion is that da Vinci painted the truth and showed Jesus next to his wife, Mary Magdalene. A character in the book says "The individual had flowing red hair, delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom.  It was, without a doubt … female."  Art historians have pointed out that da Vinci had painted other masculine biblical characters with a feminine appearance. In Saint John the Baptist , St. John the Baptist, who was described in writings as quite masculine in appearance, is painted quite feminine with long flowing hair and delicate hands.  So, is that Mary Magdalene at the right hand of Jesus, or a feminized John the Apostle? Obviously, da Vinci was not a witness to any "last supper" and if he did insert Mary, then where is the twelfth apostle that was described as being there? “And when the hour had come, He sat down, and the twelve apostles with Him.” (Luke 22:14)

Aslan doesn't really say that Jesus was married. Of course, many Christians refute Aslan's other claims. I saw articles online that claim his book is a Muslim view of Jesus. Conservative Christians also hated the recent Noah film for inserting what they saw as a a message about climate change. They were outraged by Martin Scorsese depicting Jesus as having sexual fantasies about Mary Magdalene in 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

To humanize Jesus is to take him away from being a messiah or son of God. If, as Aslan posits, Jesus was married, was not a "virgin birth," that he was a Zealot who did not want to start a religion and that Jesus did not conceive of himself as partly divine - then we have some problems with the religions that believe those things to all be true.

Presidential Inauguration Speeches

My favorite Presidential Inauguration story is a cautionary tale about long speeches and dressing for the weather.

President William H. Harrison made the longest inaugural speech in 1841 - and served the shortest term of office.

"Old Tippecanoe" gave a speech that ran an hour-and-forty-five-minutes - during a snowstorm - without wearing a topcoat, scarf or gloves.

The 68-year-old President stood outside for the entire ceremony. He greeted crowds of well-wishers at the White House later that day. He went to several celebrations that evening.

One month later he died of pneumonia. I go with the inauguration as the cause, though there is some doubt.

Lessons:

1.  Keep the speech short.  The shortest one was George Washington's Second Inaugural (130 words), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Fourth (550 words) and Abraham Lincoln's Second (700 words). See a pattern? You learn after the first term to revise and cut that speech down.
2. Dress for the weather. Mom was right. You can catch a bad cold if you stand outside in wet clothing.

What will we learn from the Trump inauguration today? We'll see... 

A Deist Inventing Air

Joseph Priestly couldn't invent air. He couldn't invent oxygen. He discovered it, but in The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America by Steven Johnson, he has his reasons for that title.

Actually, the book suggests that Priestley's most important discovery wasn't oxygen but rather carbon dioxide.

I am always looking for the unlikely connections, so I was taken in early in this book when Johnson wonders how much of the Enlightenment we might owe to coffee.

We start at the London Coffee House in 1765. Priestley is talking with his fellow scientific thinkers. This was an age when there was a move from pubs and liquor to a coffeehouse culture. Many drunken conversations became sober ones stimulated by caffeine.

Johnson likes to mix historical periods and disciplines. In his book, Everything Bad is Good for You, he mixed studies of the brain and pop culture. He argued that things like video games don't make you stupid; they make you smarter.

In another of his books, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, he examines the great cholera epidemic of 19th-century London.

I heard Johnson interviewed and he said he was struck in reading the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that there were five references to Benjamin Franklin and three to George Washington, but there were 52 to Joseph Priestley.

In the "Intermezzo" section to the book, we go back to oxygen's "early days." Around 300 million B.C. - the advent of life on earth during the brief Carboniferous era - is when plant life was in its heyday with giant trees and leaves, and all of that led to a rise in the oxygen content of the atmosphere. It changed the air. And then when all that vegetative stored energy decayed, it coal. That coal polluted the air, but also fueled the industrial age Priestly lived in.

When Priestley comes to America after our Revolution, he connects science and American politics.  Johnson writes that "The American experiment was, literally, an experiment, like one of Priestley's elaborate concoctions in the Fair Hill lab. The political order was to be celebrated not because it had the force of law, or divine right, or a standing army behind it. Its strength came from its internal balance, or homeostasis, its ability to rein in and subdue efforts to destabilize it."

Priestley the theologian took his scientific perspective, mixed in some materialism, and wrote tracts about his views.

Thomas Jefferson admired his writings and his stand against the worship of saints and the divinity of Jesus.

Jefferson gave Priestley credit for developing a Deistic faith that did not include 'supernatural" beliefs. It had a strong impact on many of the founding fathers. I don't think it is widely known that as President, Jefferson occasionally attended church services, but was not a member of any Christian church. He refused to proclaim any national days of prayer or thanksgiving.

In letters he wrote, Jefferson said he was a "Materialist" and a "Unitarian" and rejected the Christian doctrine of the "Trinity" and that of an eternal Hell.  Jefferson specifically named Joseph Priestly as one who was "the basis of my own faith." In the "Jefferson Bible", he removed quite literally with a blade the portions he could not reconcile with his beliefs. But Jefferson, as with other Deists, believed in a God.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica

"By the end of the 18th century deism had become a dominant religious attitude among upper-class Americans, and the first three presidents of the United States held this conviction, as is amply evidenced in their correspondence."

Benjamin Franklin, another Deist, was a friend with his fellow inventor, Priestley.

Deism (from the Latin word "deus" meaning "god") is a theological/philosophical position that combines the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge. It reaches the conclusion that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a single creator of the universe. It does not mean no belief in a God.

In The Age of Reason by another famous Deist, Thomas Paine, he writes that “The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical.”  (You can read/download The Age of Reason in PDF here.)

Johnson even brings Priestly into our own Information Age, pointing out Priestley's openness in the way that we talk now about "Open Everything" from computer code to textbooks and educational resources. He believed in the the "free flow of information" and shared his work, data and observations to the point that it probably lost him some credit for discoveries.

Of Whales and Rocks

Nathaniel Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea about the whaleship Essex is now a movie by the same name. Directed by Ron Howard, it is not a retelling of Melville's Moby-Dick, as it is erroneously described sometimes, but the very different story of the real sinking of a ship by a large (and not albino white) sperm whale that inspired parts of Melville's novel.

In the Heart of the Sea is the story of the Essex which left Nantucket in 1819 for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard in search of whales. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale.

The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival.

Philbrick has also written a version of the story for younger readers called Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex.

Since Philbrick wrote Why Read Moby-Dick?, it is clear that he is a fellow admirer of Mr. Melville's novel. I reread that novel or at least parts of it, every year. It has become a kind of ritual when "I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." This might happen in winter or when I feel spring nearby and I feel it "high time to get to sea as soon as I can" - or at least set sail on the Pequod again, doomed as it may be.

Another book by Philbrick that I have read is Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War and I agree with him that The Rock is the a very disappointing piece of American tourism.

I saw that rock on a road trip I made back in 1971 and it was truly underwhelming. Now that I read the story behind that hunk of Dedham granodiorite glacial erratic, it makes more sense that I felt that way. That doesn't mean the rock is unimportant though.

It was pretty much legend from the start that said that the rock at the foot of Cole's Hill was the one where the Pilgrims landed in 1620. There were plans to build a wharf at the Pilgrim's landing site in 1741.

Thomas Faunce, 94 years old and the town record keeper, identified the rock that his father said was the first solid land the Pilgrims set foot upon.  Actually, the Pilgrims first landed near the site of modern Provincetown in November 1620 and then moved on to Plymouth.

That initial settlement was built on nearby Leyden Street leading up toward Burial Hill.

In 1774, they decided to move the rock and in transporting it in a wagon, it fell off and split into two.
They left the bottom half behind at the wharf and relocated the top to the town's meeting-house.

Over the years, they built a structure to house Plymouth Rock (well, part of it) and eventually added a gate to stop souvenir hunters who had been hacking off parts of it. The upper portion of the rock was also brought back to the wharf and the date "1620" was carved into the rock.

In 1920, the rock was relocated again and the waterfront rebuilt with a waterfront promenade behind a low seawall, in such a way that when the rock was returned to its original site, it would be at water level so that you could see the tide-washed rock.

Parts of the Rock were taken, bought and sold over the years, and about one-third of the top portion remains. Today there are pieces in Pilgrim Hall Museum as well as in the Patent Building in the Smithsonian.

Alexis De Tocqueville, a Frenchman traveling throughout the United States, wrote in 1835:

"This Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns in the Union. Does this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant; and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic."

I find myself reading more non-fiction these days than ever before and Philbrick's book is also good about describing what that first Thanksgiving was really like and why the Pilgrims never called themselves pilgrims.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” I agree.

• Philbrick's official site
• Why Read Moby-Dick?
  
• In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
• Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842
• The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World