The eruption that buried the Roman city of Pompeii two millennia ago is one of the most famous tragedies in history but the exact date it occurred continues to divide scientists gathered in Italy to review the evidence that points to sometime between August and November 79 AD.
Scientists and historians met in the town of Boscoreale (south), near the ruins of the city, to debate this disputed issue in an international convention: the exact day of that “end of the world”, of the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano.
The only one who left an exact date of the tragic eruption written was one of its survivors, Pliny the Younger, who described it years later in some epistles sent to the historian Tacitus.
The oldest manuscripts of those bundles include the date “nonum kal. septembres”, that is, the ninth day before the Kalends of September, August 24, 79 AD, and this was the most traditionally accepted hypothesis.
However, the gaps in some texts, the presence of autumn fruits between the houses and streets buried forever by the volcano or the discovery of graffiti on numerous walls – a common practice in this city – fueled the enigma for centuries.
For example, in some Pliny manuscripts the central “n” of “nonum” looks more like a “v,” which led some scientists to think of the date November 1, “kalendis nov.”
The debate suffered a new shock with the discovery in 2018 of an inscription that would prove that in October the city still existed.
At the convention, the strongest defender of the traditional August 24 hypothesis was the professor of Classical Studies at the University of Greencastle, Pedar Foss: “None of the alternative readings are a better source than the manuscripts,” he declared.
His hypothesis, developed over nine years of studying the sources, is based on the transcriptions that 15th century scholars made of the manuscripts, still existing at that time.
“We should be reluctant to alter the actual date for our own convenience,” he criticized.
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Archaeologists debate the date of the Pompeii eruption
The Italian archaeologist Helga Di Giuseppe opened the focus: “We can all agree that the eruption was in the autumn” of 79 AD, a season that two millennia ago was between August and November.
The expert in Classical Archeology, Alessandro Russo, agreed with Foss that the most solid hypothesis is that of August 24 because, he said, the others “have no support in the manuscript tradition.”
The Dutch professor Nathalie de Hann and her German colleague Kurt Wallat also opted for autumn as the time of the disaster, after having collected several clues in the works in the central baths of this prosperous Roman city.
“Combining the data collected in the baths, we believe that autumn was the most likely scenario, between September, October and November as the months of the eruption,” they indicated.
The professor from the Spanish University of Valencia, Llorenç Alapont, came to show the results of a study on the clothing worn by Pompeians killed in the streets: thick wool dresses, he announced before his presentation.
Exactly one year ago, the management of this impressive site, full of villas and treasures recovered almost intact under the ash, published an article in which they acknowledged that, to date, “nothing allows us to rule out” the date of August 24.
The director of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, stated that these types of conferences serve, above all, to “celebrate the culture of dialogue,” since they brought together for the first time the defenders of the various hypotheses.
The agreement, organized by the site and the Archeoclub d’Italia association, will continue to try to bring together positions on the day of this tragedy.
An important mission for Pedar Foss, since it would put a “fixed point” in the long calendar of history, helping to calibrate the various scientific dating methods that study it.
With information from EFE
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