Technology Buried With Pompeii on Display at Museum

Tourists dazzled by the Colosseum of Rome, the arching aqueducts of the Italian countryside and other edifices of Italy in the era of the Caesars tend to overlook the technology required to construct those landmarks.

But early engineers, contractors and physicians had a variety of sophisticated tools that would be instantly recognizable to their modern counterparts.

Physicians had speculums, scalpels and other instruments that differ little from those used by doctors today. Carpenters had T-squares, levels, files, rulers, compasses and other tools still found in home workshops. Early hydraulic engineers had water wheels and Archimedes’ screws to change the course of water, as well as hydraulic valves and other implements to control its flow. Contractors had familiar cranes to lift heavy blocks and beams into place.

Some of those artifacts are on display, for the first time in the United States, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Jan. 9.

Much of our knowledge of these devices has come from Pompeii, the Italian bedroom community that was buried in ash and pumice when nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted on the afternoon of Aug. 24, AD 79. Debris from the volcano encased and protected the tools and many other artifacts for 1,700 years.

Today, the excavated city is one of the major tourist attractions of Italy, but few artifacts are to be seen at the site. Most have been moved to the National Archeological Museum in Naples, and many have been stored for years in musty warehouses.

Most of the pieces on display in Los Angeles “haven’t been seen by the public for many years,” said Anna Maria Ciarallo, the superintendent of archeology at Pompeii.

One reason why so many tools were present in Pompeii is that the city had been severely damaged by an earthquake only 17 years earlier and was still being rebuilt when it was destroyed by the eruption.

Not everything survived. Wooden objects, especially, disintegrated over time. But Italian artisans have used drawings and written descriptions to build working reproductions of such objects. For example, the forecourt of the museum displays a wooden waterwheel with pottery jugs attached to lift water from a stream and dump it into water lines.

Nearby is an Archimedes’ screw, a wooden cylinder with a spiral blade curving through it. When the screw was turned by a slave walking on a treadmill, water was lifted from a river.

Inside the exhibit is a reconstructed crane that would not be totally out of place on modern construction sites.

Other objects on display include stoves used for heating and cooking; an exquisite set of measuring jugs, each twice as large as the one before it; scales for weighing building materials and foods; and lamps. The collection also includes many well-known mosaics and other artworks.

For years, archeologists have wondered if many of the objects were produced on site or imported from other Italian cities.

But excavators have recently unearthed a bronze-working shop in Pompeii containing partially completed tools, according to Giovanni Di Pasquale of the National Archeological Museum. That suggests that at least some objects were produced locally.

The exhibit presents a remarkable picture of everyday life in this ancient community.

And for viewers who want to know even more, a museum visit can be followed up by an online tour of Pompeii itself.

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A Virtual Tour

You can take a virtual tour of the city, starting with https://pompeii.virginia.edu.

A product of the Pompeii Forum Project at the University of Virginia, the site has photographs of each building at Pompeii along with drawings and diagrams.

Text accompanying the pictures details the underlying political and cultural landscapes.

The site also features a letter from Pliny the Younger describing Pompeii’s destruction.

A related site, https://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pompeii/page-1.html, has an impressive aerial view of the excavated city from a balloon.

More lowbrow, but perhaps more entertaining, is an Amherst site, https://www.amherst.edu/~classics/class36/basilica.html.

It illustrates and translates graffiti written on Pompeiian walls by workers and residents.

One piece, for example, says, “Phileros is a eunuch.” Another bears this message: “Samius to Cornelius: Go hang yourself!” Other graffiti list gladiators’ records in the amphitheater.

Other pictures of Pompeii are available at several sites, including https://www.tulane.edu/lester/text/Western.Architect/Pompeii/Pompeii.html and https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jhauser/pictures/history/Rome/Pompeii.