The 2,000-Year-Old Discovery That Rewrote the Pompeii Story | Mummies Alive

This was once the beach of the ancient Roman city of Herculanium. In 1982, archaeologists made an incredible discovery. Inside these boatouses was a scene of horror. more than 300 skeletons. [groaning] So here on the anent beach of Urkulanium, you can see just the tragedy that occurred in 179 AD eruption here at Arculanium. — We have a disaster. We have a crisis. We have the complete bodies. We have girls. We have old people. We have children. We have every We have a dog. Here's somewhere here. There is a dog. The Herculanium 300 were found just 4 miles from this towering colossus, Mount Vuvius, one of the most dangerous volcanoes on the planet. Nearly 2,000 years ago, it erupted, burying both Pompei and Herculanium beneath mounds of ash. For centuries, archaeologists have been uncovering Herculanium's grand streets and magnificent villas. But it was only when they reached the beach that they revealed Herculanium's grim secret. Who are these people and why are they here? It was kind of detective story uh because we had to put together all different clues and evidence to try to understand it to have a complete picture of what happened during this uh eruption. The remains have now been cataloged. Each skeleton has been numbered and its location logged. Most are crowded in and around the boat houses, but one individual found on the beach is like none of the others. Who is he? For historian Adrien Murdoch, this man is key to understanding the tragedy of the Herculanium 300. This is it. Th This is the beach of Hercilanium. Everything green around here used to be sand. Our man was found there. Over there we had the boat houses. We have 300 to 350 people crammed into those boat houses. So what was happening here on the 24th of August 79 AD? It's a 2,000year-old mystery and one man might hold the answer. He's known as specimen E26. He's an adult male and his entire skeleton has been preserved, including blackened patches of flesh. It is a skull but not only skeleton. This black area is mummified skin on the skull. We can see the mummification of a part of skin of this region. Today for the very first time he is to undergo examination by a modern forensic pathologist. — We need to understand why this man died to be able to understand what was going on in hercilanium on that day. — Dr. Richard Shepard is an expert in disaster forensics. He led the investigation into the British victims of 911. This is exactly how he was found lying

in the ground when he was first unearthed by the archaeologists. What's really interesting about this position is that it must have been how he actually died. This shows the moment of his death. He's clearly fallen face down onto the ground. Maybe he's been blown there by something. Maybe he's fallen. Maybe something else has happened to cause him to collapse face down on the ground. But if we look at the left hand, you can see that it's not just lying flat on the ground. It's digging in. This man is clawing his way towards safety. His bones reveal the moment of his death. But who was he in life? Investigators turned to the artifacts found on the body. A sword, a dagger, a silver belt, and a leather pouch filled with gold and silver coins. — For the past 30 years, these artifacts have been stored in the back rooms of an Italian museum. For the first time, Adrien Murdoch gets to see them with his own eyes. This is an incredibly exciting find. Uh we have here uh enough to put together at least a plausible view of who our man was, what he did, where he came from, and what he was doing on the beach. We have several pieces here. First of all, we have the sword. This sword is not the sword of a reservist. This man who has done his time in the army and retired. This is the sword of a man in the armed forces in active service at the time of the eruption of Vuvius. Skeleton E26. The man found on the beach was a soldier. the only soldier found in the ruins of Herculanium. A decade before the eruption of Vuvius, Rome was in turmoil. Her armies had fought vicious battles against Britain in the west and Jews in the east, and civil war had threatened to tear the empire from within. — This was brother fighting brother. It was a horrible, horrible time. But by 79 AD, peace had returned and our soldier ended up here in Herculanium. It was a prized posting because Herculanium was a playground for the rich. It would have been idilic. like can these marvelous properties overlooking a bay. You can easily imagine the yachts, the boats, the fishing boats. You can see yourself in an evening uh having a glass of wine, watching the sun go down. Before the disaster, Herculanium was home to around 5,000 people. Who were they? The ruins themselves offer up some clues. This house reflects everyone who is living in Hercenanium from top to the bottom. As you walk into the house, you've got the room where the slave lived. Slightly further on in this room was the kitchen. That's where the cook lived. We're now moving into the exclusive part of the house. This was owned by a free man, a man who used to be a slave. And of course, he had his wife. children. But he also had his own slaves, people who were looking after the house. We often think when we're thinking of Hercilanian that the people here are somehow victims. They're just waiting for Vuvius to blow. But they weren't. This was a living and breathing city. What happened to all those people? Apart from the 300 on the beach, few other victims have been found. Did everyone else escape? And if so, why were these people, including the soldier, left behind?

An investigation into the Herculanium 300 is underway. Most of the bodies were packed inside these boatous, but this skeleton stands out. Archaeologists found him lying face down on the beach of the ancient Roman city of Herculanium. in his possession, a bag of coins and the weapons of an elite soldier. Now, scientists are looking for clues on the body itself. You might think that simply finding scal remains poses immeasurable problems to the pathologist because most of the internal organs are missing. However, there's an awful lot that can be deduced from examining the skeleton alone. These are the vertebrae, the components of the backbone. And interestingly, these are beginning to show some signs of wear and tear. These aren't pristine young person's vertebrae. They are the vertebrae of someone who is in early middle age, in his late 30s, maybe a bit older. He's got early arthritis of his spine, which once again may be leading to a bit of pain. It's the little injuries around our soldier that make him a real human being. This slightly grumpy middle-aged man sighing every time he sits down, complaining about the young soldiers these days, not knowing what's going on and how it was much better in his day. This builds up a picture of someone that is very easy to relate to. Any soldier walking these streets would have been surrounded by temptation because Herculanium and Pompei were not only wealthy, they were hedonistic playgrounds as well. Pompei alone was home to 35 brothel, one for every 71 male inhabitants. Ancient erotic frescos can still be seen on the walls today. Soldiers were popular customers, and Adrien is finding evidence our man was not shy when it came to sex. The detail on the scabbard is beautiful. Here you can see the um slightly ornate rings. You can just about uh make out the figures. Um one of which looks really erotic. Sorry. It looks as though there may be a couple coupling. — It's very easy to put two and two together and build a picture of a man who lived life to the full. And there's more evidence pointing to a colorful life. What was interesting about the body when they found it was that our man had his front teeth missing. We know they were lost before the disaster because the bone has healed. It's very easy to imagine a soldier in a bar brawl on a Friday night over some kind of girl. a soldier in early middle age who enjoyed all that Hercuanium had to offer until everything changed on August 24th, 79 AD. Well, you can see from here that Vuvius is even quite daunting on a morning like today. But back in AD79, the magma sitting beneath the volcano which has been stewing for many years was suddenly released. Scientists classify Vuvius as a strat volcano known not for slowmoving lava, but violent and sudden explosions. And it's as though you've taken the cork out of a champagne bottle and released that the gas bubbles. It looked like a big bellowing cloud of ash and smoke going directly up as a jet from the volcano. It would have been almost as though the gods were roaring out of the ground. And I think that'd be pretty scared.

Releasing more energy than an atomic bomb, the eruption blasts more than 200 tons of ash and rock nearly 20 m into the sky every second. The eruption began around midday. At first, the winds blew the ash cloud towards Pompei, not Herculanium. But for the people here, the clock was now ticking. — Just think about it. 7 km away, just up the hill, they were seeing a roaring plenion column fire up into the sky. They would have never have seen anything like this. They would have been terrified. And it looks like fairly early on they decided to evacuate. It's wrong to suggest that the people of Herculanium sat there and waited for events to overtake them. They were trying to do something. There was chaos. People were leaving. Houses were open. People were evacuating the city. Somewhere among the chaos was the soldier. We know he ended up on the beach, but what was he doing before he got there? Historian Adrien Murdoch is re-examining the artifacts found with his body. This is a really interesting clue. What we have here is a number of silver coins along with one gold coin and next to it another gold coin. This was a fair amount of money for a man to be carrying around. It was equivalent to a couple of years salary. — Armed to the teeth and carrying a stash of coins. — The big question is where did he get the money from? The first and most obvious solution is that this was his money. A volcano was erupting. He possibly lived in heranium. What's the first thing that you do when your house is in danger? You run in and you grab your savings. He grabbed it, put it in his pocket, and rushed to the beach. But there's another possibility. As Herculanium was evacuated and its opulent villas abandoned, there were rich pickings for those who lingered. There's a more sinister solution that our man ran into somebody else's house and raided it. Maybe he knew somebody or where they put their money. He grabbed that and then ran to the beach. These coins are the key to understanding who our soldier really was. Are they a veteran's nest egg or ill gotten gains? As disaster grips the city, will our soldier be helping others or helping himself nearly 2,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption buried the ancient Roman city of Herculanium beneath 80 ft of ash and rock. This is the material that actually buried Herculanium. This wasn't deposited in a second. It was deposited over 8 maybe 10 hours. So the whole thing builds up, layer upon layer. But in the first few hours of the eruption, most of this ash had yet to fall. The people trapped in Herculanium still had time to escape. Very quickly, a large amount of the sky would have been darkened. And as the eruption carried on, it was going on from the afternoon and into the dusk and into the nighttime. So, as things are getting darker and things are getting a bit more disorientated, it would have been a really quite eerie place to be. Historian Adrien Murdoch is on the trail of one man, a Roman soldier, fully armed and clutching a bag crammed full of cash. His body was found on the city beach. What was he doing there?

— The city of Hercilanium is behind me over there. And what you have on either side are the boat vaults. This was a busy port. There would have been fishing boats. pleasure boats. This was an active area. This would be the obvious place for people to try and run to. This was the way out of the city. Ed Galia is an expert on how humans behave in emergency situations and is himself a survivor of an airplane crash. He believes the evacuation of Herculanium fits into a recognizable pattern. In most emergency situations, human behavior is quite predictable. people tend to evacuate towards the familiar. This place is is a port. And so it's likely that people thought this is a good way to get away. exit route. And so they would have gone down to the beach to try and get onto a boat to take them away because it it's probably one of the normal u uh routes by which people approach and leave the town. It will have been boats like this coming in, going out at the time of the eruption in Vuvius, carrying people to safety, getting them away from the danger zone over there to where they could be safe. This entire bay would have been full of boats this size and shape. People were trying to get away as quickly as possible. This was their only route to safety. But were there enough boats to go around? At one end of the beach, archaeologists discovered a single upturned boat, which they believe may have been damaged and unseaorthy. This is the only boat that was found in Hercenanium, and it's hard not to see it as the last boat in the city. a horrible possibility. It was a symbol here that people in the boat vaults could see a boat and they knew that it couldn't get them to safety so near and yet so far. Who were the 300? If we knew their identities, we might be one step closer to knowing why they were left on the beach. — It is a mystery because we don't know exactly who they were. We would like to know who died on the beach of Erolan. — There's a clue in the boatous. In this case, it's not what archaeologists found. It's what they didn't find that counts. The Hercuanium 300 are remarkable for their lack of possessions. The soldier has his coins. And one woman clutches her jewelry. But otherwise, these are evacuees with few worldly goods. It's a city of the rich on the run. But most of these 300 are conspicuous for their lack of status or wealth. — You could argue that the people on the beach were the poorest. They were the last to leave because uh everyone else was going taking whatever they could with them uh to get away as quickly as they could. And the people that were left behind were the lowest levels of the of society. In an emergency situation, you're probably not going to be thinking much of your slaves. — With not enough boats to go around, were the poor made to wait? And did the rich get preferential treatment? — The social norms that we have in normal life tend to survive even in emergency situations. It's interesting to speculate how the rich got away from her calenium. Many will have had their own boats, but it's also possible to be a bit more cynical and suggest that they paid to get away. They paid to escape. Rome society was still very stratified. If you had money, you could do whatever you wanted. There was only one man found on the beach with both weapons and money. Did he use his muscle to turn a profit?

Adrien Murdoch takes another look at the gold and silver coins and puts two and two together. It's possible that it might have been blood money. It's clear that our man was on the beach. He looked as though he was organizing the evacuation. It's very possible that some of the rich citizens of Hercenanium paid him to get them onto the boat. It's a chilling theory, not yet proven. The next challenge for investigators is to figure out what happened after all the boats had gone. Could anyone survive? Midnight in Herculanium. Mount Vuvius has been erupting for nearly 12 hours. 300 survivors have fled to the beach looking for rescue. It's dark. It's after midnight. The city of Hercilania behind me is more or less evacuated. Everybody who could has gone. Anyone left has come down here. — Among them is the soldier. It's clear that the people in Herculanium are on their own. Our soldier is the only one in command there. There is no one to help the people of Hercilanium other than him. However, he came by his money. His weapons suggest a man who wielded authority. — This is a new type of sword. In fact, it's called the Pompei sword. This is quite literally cuttingedge equipment. This isn't the equivalent of having a shotgun in the garage um or even an AK-47. It's topnotch state-of-the-art military hardware. by the look of him um and certainly from the state of the quality um of the equipment that he was uh carrying at the time, he wasn't just a lowly grunt. — Perhaps not a looter or bully at all, but for the survivors, their last best hope. — People will have been looking to him to get them off or at least to give them a plan. In an emergency situation, uh, most people are starved of information and it's key to get the right information. And so people tend to look for authority figures to tell them what to do, to give them advice, to give them direction. And so if you are an authority figure and you're wearing the clothing of someone who is in authority, a respected figure, it's likely that people will defer to you and follow instructions that you provide. If he was their leader, what was his plan? No eyewitness accounts from the beach survive, but investigators are recognizing intriguing patterns in the distribution of the skeletons. The majority of the males they are on the beach while women and old and young individuals they are inside the protection of the arched chamber could suggest a an attempt to organize try to find shelter. Many of the bodies of the children were found asleep. They were lying down. They might have been running around earlier. They may be making noise, getting in people's feet, but after midnight, they were asleep. You can imagine a group of adult discussing what's going on, putting the older, the youngest, and the women inside the chamber and discussing what we do now because no more boats, no more possibility to escape through the sea. In the blackness of night, with all the boats gone, it looks like a decision was made to hunker down and hope for rescue in the morning. The boat houses were a perfect shelter, facing away from the volcano and offering a lookout towards the sea. Our man is standing there in the middle

of the beach. It's easy to imagine him slightly isolated, lost in thought, looking out towards the sea, trying to work out if he can see any shapes coming through the darkness. The soldier had good reason to hope for rescue. Just across the Bay of Naples was Messenum, a major Roman naval base. Earlier that day, a rescue had been attempted. The evidence is this 2,000-year-old letter, the only surviving account of the eruption written by an eyewitness. It describes the actions of a man named Plenny, the commander of the Roman Navy. He saw the eruption from across the bay and launched the fleet in a daring rescue bid. Plenny and his fleet have come from Missanum over there behind me and they're heading straight for Vuvius. Vuvius is still erupting. There is a huge plume of smoke going straight in the air right above Vuvius. Uh ashes are starting to fall on the uh sea. There are bits of pummish. rock there. There there's broken stones falling on the fleet where we are right now. The helmsman starts to get scared. He comes to Plenny and he says, "We need to turn back. He's scared. He wants to get back home again. " Plenny says no. He says, "Fortis, Fortuna, Uvat, fortune favors the bold. Continue. " But plenty doesn't reach Herculanium. Falling ash and rock make it impossible to land. And then after midnight, the volcanic — eruption enters a new and violent phase, changing everything. — For a few hours now, there's been this weird gray dark column of hot rock and ash violently ejecting from Vuvius behind us. And then something changes in the eruption column. It begins to collapse, producing pyrolastic density currents, lethal clouds of ash and noxious gas. And within a matter of minutes, pyrolastic density currents came barreling down the mountain from right up there all the way down and just washed like a river of rock and dust. It's just over 4 miles from the volcano to the beach. The cloud will reach the survivors in less than 6 minutes. They may not have been able to see Vuvius from where they were standing here, but they could certainly hear something. And then disaster was coming raining down on them from Vubius. There was a mad panic. By the time it reached this street, it could have been traveling at maybe 80 km an hour, even 100 km an hour. Sort of hurricane speed. Seconds later, it hits the beach. It envelops the 300 and the soldier. Pollo Petroni uncovered many of these bodies himself. He's trying to figure out exactly what happened and if anyone could have survived. Until now, it was widely assumed that most of the victims suffered a prolonged agony from suffocation by volcanic ash and gas. — But there are no obvious signs of suffocation. If they should die by suffocation, we should expect to find them just defending themselves or trying to breathe with both ends on their faces trying to do last breath. But in this case, we never have this kind of evidence.

— Far from struggling, the skeletons appear suspended in the last moment of life. In this case here we have for instance a child probably four or five years child which is just frozen and there is an old man just sitting with a child beneath the legs. So what did kill these people? Once again the bones yield vital clues. The skull number 14 showed in the frontal region the sign of fire particle that impacted with the face of the subject from right to left producing this burn marks. The cloud was not only thick and poisonous, but hot as well. — How hot, how fast. A lot of it depends on the exact nature of the pyrolastic density current. In some instances, it's very, very light and fluffy, but you can have temperatures from 200° centigrade up to maybe 700° centigrade. That's not unheard of. hot enough to boil brains. The skull demonstrated a tragic date. In fact, the high temperature produce immediately the evaporation of brine and this increase instantaneously the pressure inside the skull causing the skull explosion in both side temporal squammer right and left. The cerebral material bursts out. And there's something else inside the boatouses. There is a microscopic layer of red colored ash, evidence of human blood. We found this red ash layer all up and below the skeletons and the micro analysis revealed very high quantity of iron within it. And the biomolelecular test showed the presence of a hea of a human hemoglobin which then testifies that this is the dry residual of the vaporization of flesh of these people. to vaporize flesh, blacken bone, and produce the thin layer of red ash. Scientists believe temperatures reached 900° F, 500 C. No one could have survived. — If these people on the beach were suddenly engulfed in dust and debris and ash at 500° centigrade, these people would have been dead within 2 seconds. — So not a prolonged agony. Death was mercifully quick. The stance of these victims tell us that they died very quick just in a fraction of a second. Their bodies were frozen by a kind of uh eastern rigger mortise that crystallized the last activity of these people. It happened so fast the sleeping children probably didn't wake up. When the exc the archaeologist excavated this, they found at the bottom close to the uh ground the children the youngest individual. Why the older one on the top? Possibly because they tried to cover the youngest to protect him. But what of the soldier? He wasn't seeking the shelter of the boatouses. Why? For our investigators, it's the final mystery of the 300. A cloud of death envelops Herculania, killing more than 300, including the soldier. Like the other victims, his skeleton shows evidence of exposure to extreme heat.

So there's significant signs of burning on this body. You can see the dark charring that's on the back of the left shoulder, head, and coming down to the arm. And these areas are really quite significant. So showing there's been extensive exposure to heat of these areas. But what explains the position of his hand? So when you look at the left hand, it's not flat on the ground. This left hand is curled in as though he's desperately trying to crawl his way as a last gasp effort to get away from whatever is happening. The thing that finally killed him. It looks like he's crawling away. But Pier Palo Petron has seen it before and has a scientific explanation. The contracted end is found everywhere something like this with everyone with every individual and that's just contraction induced by the heat by the high temperature. So all people as hands and feet completely contracted. But the soldiers death differs in one important respect. Unlike most of the others who were trying to seek shelter, the soldier stood his ground in the middle of the beach. The question is why? It's quite possible that he was on his own because he was ordering people, instructing people to seek cover. I think he was managing the evacuation process. He was looking after all these people and he was trying to do his best to save as many people as he could. And when he heard the cloud, the rumbling of the cloud coming, he was barking orders getting people to race in to the vaults to try and uh save their lives. A soldier is standing here. He doesn't move. It's easy to imagine him standing here yelling at everybody to get themselves into the boat molds. Make yourself safe. Get in there. Protect yourself. But he doesn't move. He stands here and he's found right there. So what would have happened in that last final split second? The heat would have caused his skin to dissolve. Underneath his skin, the muscles would have then been affected by the heat. They would have been drawn out. The fat that was in the body would have begun to burn and that would have helped burn the muscles away. And then eventually we're just left with the skeleton that we see lying face down on the ground. 2,000 years later, archaeologists will find him on the beach of Hercuanium. He died dressed in his full military kit with a pocket full of coins. Was it his money or someone else's? We can never know for sure. But for investigators, one fact remains. Given the chance to escape, he chose to stay. waiting on the beach with the 300 until the very end. — I think the guy on the beach, I think he was generally a good guy. I'd like to think he was a good guy. — You can see him warts and all. This was a human being there. This wasn't an ideal hero. Extraordinary times create extraordinary people. And while this man may have been uh a bit of a down and out in his private life and it's easy to imagine um what he did in his spare time at the time of Vuvius, it looks as though he was the man trying to protect the survivors of Hercilanium. I think he was a good man at the end. —