Yesterday at the recommendation of the professors of Plus3, I visited the ruins of Pompeii, a city that was frozen in time when mount Vesuvius, the giant mountain in the pictures from my vico equense update, erupted. This explosion covered the city in ashes for thousands of years and kept everything incredibly well preserved. The site was not discovered until about 1829 (I forget the exact date). The uncovering of the city gave us great insight into the culture in the early Roman Empire.
The town was extremely sophisticated for its time, and I was surprised to see how they solved various issues back in their time with the limited technology they had. For example, they used a spring high on the mountain so the force of gravity powered the water pressure. If the water pressure was too high, the pipes could burst, so they also built towers in the town where the water could rise and fall to keep a steady pressure. Seeing engineering techniques like this at play merely shows that these people were just as smart as us, except they had many more limited resources of knowledge and schooling than we have today. Another example for the ingenuity of the city was the “sewage system,” where people placed all of their garbage in the street. This would be considered extremely unsanitary today, but they also built sidewalks that people could walk on, and raised stepping stones to cross the dirty streets, like our common day crosswalks. These raised stones were built so that chariots could still pass over them in between the gaps. When they got rain, the roads would turn into rivers and the garbage would be washed away. The raised stones were a safe passage of the streets during the rain also.
Another interesting aspect of the city were the commonplace brothels. The city had a large number of them throughout and had landmarks throughout the city to point towards these places. Even back then, sex was not only used for reproduction, but also as a source of pleasure. This is yet another example of how even though times were different, people were still, pretty much the same as us today. Here is a picture of the “arrow” they used to direct citizens to the nearest brothel.
The coolest part of the city was the extremely well preserved molds of the citizens in the ash. When Pompeii was discovered, the archeologists discovered hollow parts in the ground they were excavating. They filled these with plaster and let them harden, creating molds of people and even dogs. When the ash covered the bodies, they decomposed and left a hollow area in the ash, which is why these holes existed. These molds really put you in the shoes of the Pompeian citizens as they watched in fear as their entire world around them ended. It really goes to show how fragile human life is to the power of nature and to external events.
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