Two thousand years on, scholars still don’t agree on the day the destruction of Pompeii began. Two new studies only fan the fire. When Mt Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, fiery avalanches of ash and pumice assaulted Pompeii, displacing about 15,000 inhabitants and killing at least 1500 more.
Volcanic debris “poured across the land,” wrote Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger, and blanketed the town in a darkness “like the black of closed and unlighted rooms”. Within two days, Pompeii had vanished, leaving little more than a legend until 1748, when the chance discovery of a water line prompted the first deliberate excavation. In his late-18th century travelogue Italian Journey , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed that no calamity in history had given greater entertainment to posterity than the eruption that had buried Pompeii.
For scholars and armchair archaeologists, that entertainment has involved wrangling over pretty much every facet of the disaster. They still can’t agree on the day Vesuvius blew its top, the height of the umbrella-shaped cloud or the length and the aggression of the blasts. Two new research projects add kindling to those embers.
A report published by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii resurrected the once widely accepted belief that the cataclysm began to unfold August 24, the date put forward by Pliny, who was 17 when he witnessed the event from a villa across the Bay of Naples. His letters to historian Tacitus, written more than 25 years after t.