Pompeii: The City Frozen in Time

Almost 2,000 years ago, a whole city went to sleep and never woke up. One morning in the year 79, the people of Pompeii, Italy were baking bread, feeding dogs, and buying bread at the market, just like any other day. By afternoon, a mountain nearby called Mount Vesuvius exploded and buried the entire city under ash. The city stayed hidden and forgotten for almost 1,700 years!

- What a lost civilization is and how a whole city can disappear - The true story of Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius - How diggers found Pompeii again hundreds of years later - Why the things left behind can tell us how people really lived

A lost civilization is a place where people once lived busy lives, with homes, markets, and streets, but the place got covered up, forgotten, or abandoned so completely that later people did not know it was ever there. Sometimes cities get lost under sand, like in a desert. Sometimes they get lost under jungle plants that grow over everything. Pompeii got lost under hot ash and rock from a volcano.

Mount Vesuvius was a volcano that the people of Pompeii lived right next to. They did not know it could explode. On one day in the year 79, it blew huge clouds of hot ash into the sky. The ash fell like heavy snow for hours, piling up on roofs, streets, and gardens until it buried the whole city, sometimes as deep as 20 feet, which is taller than a giraffe stacked on top of another giraffe!

For almost 1,700 years, nobody knew Pompeii was still down there under the ground. Farmers grew grapes on the hill without knowing a whole city was buried beneath their feet. Then, starting in the year 1748, workers digging in the ground found walls, then whole buildings. Diggers called archaeologists carefully removed the ash, bit by bit, and uncovered streets, houses, and even loaves of bread left in ovens, exactly where people left them almost two thousand years earlier.