Vesuvius buried a Roman town under six metres of ash in 79
Pompeii, near Naples, vanished under four to six metres of Vesuvius ash and pumice in AD 79 with Herculaneum and Stabiae. A wealthy city of perhaps 10,000–20,000—household counts suggest 11,000–11,500 on 64–67 hectares—froze mid-gesture for archaeologists.
The town stood about forty metres above sea level on a coastal plateau of lava from earlier eruptions of Vesuvius, eight kilometres away, with steep drops to the sea on the south and west. Once on the shore, the site is now some 700 metres inland. Beside it the navigable Sarno River met the sea behind sheltering lagoons, a haven used by early Greek and Phoenician sailors and later developed by the Romans.
The first stable settlement came in the eighth century BC, when the Oscans of central Italy founded five villages here, and an Oscan word for five may underlie the name. Greeks reached Campania from about 740 BC, bringing the cult of Apollo and a Doric temple on the site of the later Triangular Forum. Early in the sixth century BC the villages merged into one community at the crossroads of routes to Cumae, Nola and Stabiae, ringed by a tufa wall that enclosed far more land than the town itself, a sign of early wealth. Growth quickened after 450 BC following the Battle of Cumae.
The eruption of AD 79 buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under four to six metres of ash and pumice. The prosperous town covered 64 to 67 hectares, and estimates based on households suggest 11,000 to 11,500 residents.
Rediscovered in the late sixteenth century and dug systematically from the mid-eighteenth, it helped shape modern archaeology, although early excavators removed or damaged much. UNESCO describes it as the only site giving a complete picture of an ancient Roman city, and about 2.5 million people visit each year.
Source: Pompeii
