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Archaeological Finds That Rewrote Our Understanding of History

Khalid Elhassan January 9, 2024 30 min

Archaeological - Ashurbanipal — Ashurbanipal. British Museum

The Ancient World’s Most Famous Natural Disaster

The Last Day of Pompeii, by Karl Brulov. Google Art Project

On August 24^th, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted with a force 100,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The blast tossed deadly debris, mixed with a cloud of poisonous gasses, over twenty miles high. As Vesuvius spewed into the air, lava and hot pumice poured out of the volcano’s mouth at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second. The mixture raced down the mountainside to devastate the surrounding region and destroy nearby towns, of which Pompeii and Herculaneum are the best known.

There had been tremors for days, but they were not unusual. Then, around noon on August 24^th, a cloud appeared atop Vesuvius. About an hour later, the volcano erupted and ash began to fall on Pompeii, six miles away. By 2 PM, volcanic debris, begin to fall with the ash. By 5 PM, sunlight had been completely blocked and roofs in Pompeii began to collapse under the accumulating weight of ash and pumice. Panicked townspeople rushed to the harbor to seek any ship that would take them away.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.