Located near what is now Naples, in Italy, in the vicinity of Mount Vesuvius. The small but wealthy city of Herculaneum, the protagonist of this story was. On the other side of Vesuvius, the famous city of Pompeii was.
On 24 August 79 AD, the inhabitants of Herculaneum were his life normally, without suspecting that death hovered right around the corner.
Shortly before noon, a huge roar that rocked the ground and shook the whole city was heard. Soon after, an eruption caused the top of Mount Vesuvius erupted in boiling fragments totaled more than 20 kilometers high, so that reached the stratosphere.
We do not know what the reaction of the people at that time, but recent observations reveal that disaster of this size, people are like hypnotized and instead of running away, is staring apparently unaware of the danger.
After an hour of rash have occurred, they started falling volcanic debris, but the wind carried the ashes to the neighboring city of Pompeii, where fragments of incandescent rock roofs and melted ash completely hid the sun. The noise must have been terrifying.
But Herculaneum, the vision of the plume rose vertically without threat to the city. All the fragments had the wind direction to Pompeii.
Herculaneum residents felt safe and thanked their gods for having protected the city. But in the middle of the night, the huge plume of smoke lost livelihoods and collapsed in horrid crash on Herculaneum numb.
The pyroclastic flow, which is a combination of burning particles and hot gases, rushed like a hurricane of fire without giving time to nothing.
Both cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii were missing buried under the burning ashes. Pompeii lay three meters underground. Herculano however, was under 20 meters of ash and volcanic rock.
Pompeii, being only three meters underground, had some rescue attempts, but Herculano had been wiped off the face of the earth.
Slowly the years passed and the centuries fell like leaves of ancient tree of time.
In the eighteenth century, a peasant was a well looking for water but in his effort, which was met with a lost and forgotten city of Herculaneum.
Gradually, archaeologists were discovering the ruins of the city and it opened their door to direct Roman way of life at that time,
because while other cities of the empire had slowly deteriorated by abandonment and inclement environment, and buried Herculaneum had remained silent, intact as a time capsule.
The houses, with their furniture and beds and even their cooking utensils, were as their owners had left them 600 thousand years ago.
Wonderful sculptures, exquisite mosaics and frescoes painted beautifully. It was all there: the furniture of precious wood carvings were petrified preserving detail with incredible accuracy.
Since some houses the ruins they found the table set giving the impression that people had left in a hurry, archaeologists came to believe that the people of Herculaneum had escaped and left the city behind. But recently archaeologists made a gruesome discovery: In what had been the boathouse of the city, a kind of dock where people took boats to enter and leave the place, were 300 bodies, mostly of women and children. They huddled and hugging each other, maybe they were waiting for a rescue that never came.
A wave of scalding pyroclastic flow reached them, making the flesh, muscles and viscera evaporate instantly.
At this temperature, the brain begins to boil and to be confined within the skull, the steam exerts such pressure that makes your head explode like a balloon.
They even found the body of a young mother with a baby in her arms. The woman was pregnant and fetal skeletal remains inside.
It was certainly tragic fate of the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii. It's any consolation, thanks to the ruins of both cities we know almost exactly the Roman way of life of 2000 years ago.
According to information published by the BBC on its website from June 16, 2011, a team of British archaeologists discovered in the ancient city of Herculaneum, a sewer containing 774 bags of excrement a length of almost 2thousand years.
The strange thing is that the quality and consistency of the droppings were so good as to make medical tests after almost 20 centuries have remained underground.
These analyzes allowed the researchers to discover the diet of the inhabitants of this city: Sea urchins, eggs, figs, olives, nuts and dormice. The latter considered a delicacy of the upper class.
