Programmes

The Riddle of Pompeii


This two-part special began with a new theory about the legendary eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Twenty thousand people once lived in Pompeii in the shadow of the volcano. The remains of around 1,000 have been found in the buried city. Many more, having abandoned their homes and fled, died outside.

It has long been thought that all the dead were buried by falling rock or consumed by lava - but, strangely, the bodies show almost no sign of injury. Following 20 years of research, Professor Haraldur Sigurdsson, a world authority on volcanoes, has developed a radical new theory: the deaths were the result of a very rare volcanic event, one that killed thousands within minutes of each other. Only now are the forensic clues in and around Pompeii revealing the truth about what happened on that fateful day.

The Hidden Scrolls of Herculaneum


To conclude this Secrets of the Dead special, we travelled back to the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. The latter is one of the most active and deadly volcanoes on the face of the planet and has held sway over the Bay of Naples in south-west Italy for thousands of years. Its most famous victim was the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, but another buried city is proving to be of even greater archaeological significance.

The Roman seaside resort of Herculaneum, destroyed during the same eruption that wiped out Pompeii, was no ordinary town. It was a seat of knowledge, frequented by some of the most famous minds of antiquity, including Virgil and Horace who studied within the walls of the Villa dei Papiri. Here, thousands of papyrus scrolls, turned into charcoal by the eruption, have been exhumed - scrolls that, incredibly, can now be opened and read. They are now shedding light on how the Romans lived, their philosophy of life and their attitudes to sex, slaves and gods.

This programme retraced the discovery of the town itself, on the back of which the science of archaeology itself was born. It relived the rediscovery and excavation of the Villa dei Papiri, as well as the opening and reading of its treasured texts using NASA imaging technology. We also discovered the incredible degree of preservation within the town's buildings, its destruction due to a massive pyroclastic flow and the horrific final moments of a population originally thought to have escaped to safety.

Herculaneum is one of the least-known, yet most important and unique, of archaeological sites, whose story, until now, has rarely been told.



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