How Pompeii’s rocks reveal the city’s final hours

It’s been frozen in time for almost 2 000 years, and every rock, street, nook, cranny and remnant tells its own story. In fact, said geoscientist Chris Jackson, it almost felt as though every part of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii whispered to you. Jackson consulted the team that created National Geographic’s spectacular series Pompeii: Out Of Time on the ancient tragedy.

“It didn’t feel like a film set,” he said. “And it didn’t feel like this kind of make-believe world. It was clearly like a modern-day city.” Among the ruins, he could walk to the bakery.

The voices in the street belonged to other tourists, but the illusion held. “It felt like you were actually in a city which was still a hive of activity.” An entire city was destroyed in less than a day. In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted above the Bay of Naples and buried Pompeii and its neighbour Herculaneum under metres of ash and rock.

What came instead were pyroclastic flows, avalanches of superheated gas and volcanic debris that raced down the mountainside faster than anything on the ground could move. Thousands died, and the hot ash sealed them where they fell, preserving their streets, kitchens and even ancient graffiti. ‘It’s like the city whispers’ Loki star Tom Hiddleston hosts the three-part series, now streaming on Disney+.

The dramatised documentary follows three real Romans through their final hours: a teenage apprentice, a wealthy businesswoman and a member of the Praetorian Guard, the elite soldiers who acted as the Roman emperor’s personal bodyguard. Its central argument is an uncomfortable one: that many of the people who died that day could have lived. Picture Supplied Jackson was one of the scientists brought in to help read the ancient evidence, and it was not the bodies that interested him most.

It was the ground beneath their feet. “If you want to go and not just go around looking at bodies frozen in time in a really macabre sense, there’s a bit more richness scientifically to taking those learnings,” he said, “and in some ways filling out the last moments of those people’s lives. I’d like to think that’s a respectful activity for a geoscientist to undertake.” “Start with what we tend to get wrong about the Romans,” he said.