Today in History—August 24: A Buried City Keeps Surprising Us
We still have questions about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that doomed Pompeii—even though the study of its site began centuries ago, kickstarting the very field of archaeology.
The task of piecing together the story of the buried city continues to this day.
For starters, there are two different dates for the eruption. October 24 was proposed after two researchers in 1929 examined a damaged word in the letters of Pliny the Younger—the only eyewitness to leave a written account of the eruption. They combined two competing readings of the word to produce a third interpretation. The presence of fall fruits also leads some researchers to pin the eruption to a later date.
And here’s how we get to the traditionally held date, this day in 79 ce. In letters written to the historian Tacitus, Pliny described the date of the eruption as “nonum kal. Septembres,” or nine days before September, that is, August 24. Pliny lost his uncle (Pliny the Elder) in the disaster. He relates how his uncle’s curiosity was drawn to the extraordinary cloud rising from Mount Vesuvius. Pliny the Elder, commander of a fleet in the Bay of Naples, went ashore and was killed in the disaster.
What Pliny could only describe seeing from a distance is now better understood: About noon the volcano erupted. This was promptly followed by rapidly moving ground-hugging clouds of blistering hot gas and rock fragments, a phenomenon called pyroclastic flow. We know now that pyroclastic flows can move at speeds up to 100 miles per hour. The city and its inhabitants were doomed.
At the similarly affected town of Herculaneum, the eruption’s heat turned hundreds of papyrus scrolls to carbon without destroying them. But it left them too delicate to be manipulated. Attempts to open them destroyed parts. In June 2026 researchers used micro-CT scanning technology to read one such fragile scroll, without ever needing to unroll it, revealing a philosophical treatise on ethics.
Two thousand years on, the cities buried by Vesuvius are still revealing their secrets.
Among nearly 300 graffitied messages on Pompeii’s walls were a declaration of love and a gladiator fight scene.
- 32
- Hours the eruption lasted
- 17
- Destructive pyroclastic currents identified
- 1748
- Year excavation of Pompeii began
- 1456: The first decorated Gutenberg Bible is marked complete by its binder
- 1870: The Wolseley Expedition reaches modern-day Manitoba
- 2006: Pluto is downgraded to a dwarf planet
