Pompei Mystery

The documentary Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time is about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened 2,000 years ago and affected the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pompeii was a major city for entertainment in the Roman Empire with residents coming from all over and Herculaneum was a small city mostly for the powerful and wealthy. The documentary goes into detail on both cities from resident lifestyles, the volcanic eruption, how long after the eruption before people started to die, and how the cities were affected differently by the explosion. During the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, an eyewitness in Naples named Pliny the Younger was writing letters to the Roman historian Tacitus about the volcanic eruption giving an accurate time frame and

Some thought with the bodies being preserved in ash, no evidence of lava, and a remain appearing the be covering his mouth that they suffocated from the smoke and ash. Later it was said to be misinterpreted because when people die suddenly from suffocation they fall to the ground in any kind of posture and do not remain in a fixed position (Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time). Studies were done leading to the new interpretation that the residents died from the heat of the pyroclastic surge not suffocation from gas and ash. The poses and ash covered bodies were reinterpreted, as the surge was able to cool to the right temperature so the body would overheat but not burn off skin, the poses were caused by involuntary motion from the muscles burning, and the falling ash that covered the city preserved the remains (Pompeii: The Mystery of People Frozen in Time). Pliny the Younger witnessed one of the pyroclastic surges and wrote about it but he was ignored until a volcano in Washington had one which led to an accurate cause of death for the