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The inscription discovered in the new excavations is nothing more than a scrawl in charcoal, likely made by a worker renovating a home. But it is dated to 16 days before the "calends" of November in the old Roman calendar style - which is 17 October in our modern dating method. "Since it was done in fragile and evanescent charcoal, which could not have been able to last long, it is highly probable that it can be dated to the October of AD 79," the archaeology team said in a statement. They believe the most likely date for the eruption...

Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeii's destruction, according to Italian researchers who have analyzed the town's last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based seasoning. Frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption that covered Pompeii and nearby towns nearly 2,000 years ago with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the desiccated remains were found at the bottom of seven jars. The find revealed that the last Pompeian garum was made entirely with bogues (known as boops boops), a Mediterranean fish species that abounded in the area in the summer months of...

Today is the anniversary of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and the death of Pliny the Elder (born A.D. 23) in that event. The eruption, which followed several years of precursor ground movements, buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and is thought to have killed as many as 15,000 people. Subsequent major eruptions occurred in 1631, 1906, and 1944, the last just after the Allies had taken the city of Naples in World War II. Pliny the Elder is remembered primarily for his "Natural History," a comprehensive compendium of ancient knowledge of the natural world....

A video tour of the ancient city of Herculaneum buried by the volcanic eruption of AD 79. It is remarkably well preserved despite some nasty looting when first discovered in the 18th century. Currently it is believed that only about a quarter of the city has been excavated. Most of the rest lies still buried. Complicating excavations is that a modern city has been built on top of the old.

A fresco-covered Roman villa, found underneath a church on Italy's sun-kissed Amalfi coast, is set to open to the public for the first time in July.... Italy's Culture Undersecretary, Antimo Cesaro... told Ansa the ruin was "a perfectly preserved archaeological treasure of enormous artistic value". The enormous villa dates back to the second century BC and was first unearthed eight metres below the church of Santa Maria dell'Assunta in central Positano, Campania, in 2004. Prior to its discovery, the impressive abode had lain hidden since AD 79 when an eruption of Vesuvius buried it under volcanic stone and ash. The...

Analysis of Herculaneum papyrus scroll fragments reveals the use of metallic ink in Greco-Roman literary inscription centuries earlier than previously thought, according to a study*. Scholars of ancient scrolls hold that texts from antiquity, particularly Greek and Latin literary manuscripts produced until the fourth century AD, were largely written in carbon-based ink on papyri, the fibrous structure of which allowed scribes to jettison ruling lines. Vito Mocella and colleagues used nondestructive synchrotron X-ray-based methods to chemically analyze the barely visible black inscriptions on two nearly flat, multilayered papyrus fragments that were found at the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum in...

Dormice, sea urchins and fresh figs were among the delicacies enjoyed by ordinary Romans, British archaeologists have revealed after discovering a giant septic tank at one of the ancient cities destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius... Archaeologists found a treasure trove of everyday artefacts after digging up nearly 800 sacks of compacted human waste from the tank, which lies beneath the remains of a Roman apartment block in Herculaneum, destroyed after it was buried by ash from the volcano in AD79. The British team has found hundreds of objects, including bronze coins, precious stones, bone hair pins and an...

Pliny the Elder's ship approached the shore near Pompeii. Ashes were already falling, hotter and thicker as the ships drew near, followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames . . . Meanwhile on Mount Vesuvius broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points, their bright glare emphasized by the darkness of night. (pp. 429, 431) But they could not land because the shore was blocked by volcanic debris, so they sailed south and landed at Stabiae. Hoping to quiet the frightened people, the uncle asked to be carried to the...

...The two towns remained largely undisturbed, lost to history, through the rise of Byzantium, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In 1738, Maria Amalia Christine, a nobleman's daughter from Saxony, wed Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples, and became entranced by classical sculptures displayed in the garden of the royal palace in Naples. A French prince digging in the vicinity of his villa on Mount Vesuvius had discovered the antiquities nearly 30 years earlier, but had never conducted a systematic excavation. So Charles dispatched teams of laborers and engineers equipped with tools and blasting powder to the site of...

The 12-metre high pyramid allows visitors to walk along a track before entering it. It is built almost entirely out of wood with an inner dome made of fiberboard Inside, they will be find the casts of Roman citizens killed more than 1,900 years ago in 79AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating force destroying the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The plaster casts are placed in the centre, while the exhibition also features archival photographs documenting the work in the excavations in the 19th and 20th centuries. The photos are partly broken down into fragments and then reassembled...

The director of MRI and radiology at Kadlec Medicl Center watched a TV documentary years ago about efforts to read the ancient scrolls and the story stuck with him. This week, Iuliano is using his expertise to scan fragments of the charred scrolls in hopes of discovering what they say... The papyrus scrolls were discovered more than 200 years ago in a villa in what was the Roman town of Herculaneum. The town was buried along with the more famous city of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted. The scrolls make up the only surviving library from antiquity, Iuliano said. Scholars have...

Buried deep in the Villa dei Papiri, covered by the molten lava of Vesuvius, lies one of the finest libraries of the ancient world. But excavation may destroy more than it savesThey look like lumps of coal, and when the Swiss military engineer and his team who first explored the buried town of Herculaneum in the 18th century encountered them, that was how they were treated: as ancient rubbish, to be dumped in the sea. But before being hit by a cascade of molten volcanic rock at more than 400C (the so-called pyroclastic flow that inundated the town), these now-blackened...

A PHILANTHROPIST has stepped forward to fund excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum in Italy, where scholars believe a Roman library lies buried beneath 3m of lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

Ancient Roman villa may hold world's richest literary treasure By Robert Harris April 2 2002 Two thousand years ago, on the Bay of Naples, in the outskirts of the luxurious resort of Herculaneum, stood one of the grandest houses of the Roman world. The Blenheim Palace extended more than 200 metres along the shoreline and included an Olympic-sized pool. The extraordinary construction, which has never been fully excavated, is now the subject of an academic controversy. Eight of the world's leading scholars of ancient literature, including four professors of Greek (from the universities of Bristol, Harvard, London and Oxford) have...

Using infrared reflectography, a non-destructive technique commonly used to peek beneath the surface of paintings, Italian researchers have brought to light two inscriptions against garbage dumping in the ancient Roman town Herculaneum... The finding shows that even before the eruption buried Herculaneum under 75 feet of ash, local authorities were already trying to reign in trash. Luciano Rosario Maria Vicari, director of an applied optics laboratory at Naples University, and colleagues analyzed Herculaneum's notice board, which was found on the eastern side of the city's water tank. The board for public notices consisted of a plastered rectangular area that housed...

For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile. Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans. They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.

A unique exhibition of 2,000-year-old paintings called Pompeian Red has opened at the National Museum of Rome.

It's hot storage. Millions of years before volcanic ash entombed the Roman town of Pompeii, a group of dinosaurs succumbed to a similar fate. China's famous feathered dinosaur fossils owe their exquisite preservation to volcanic eruptions between about 130 and 120 million years ago. The Jehol fossils have transformed our understanding of dinosaurs by showing that the relatives of Velociraptor and T. rex had a feather-like body covering, like birds. The Jehol deposits also preserved soft tissue from early mammals and flowering plants. Baoyu Jiang of Nanjing University, China, and his colleagues think they know why the remains are so...

'The British Museum's 2013 show of artefacts from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash during an explosive eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a sell-out. But could even greater treasures - including lost works of classical literature - still lie underground?.'

For centuries scholars have been hunting for the lost works of ancient Greek and Latin literature. In the Renaissance, books were found in monastic libraries. In the late 19th Century papyrus scrolls were found in the sands of Egypt. But only in Herculaneum in southern Italy has an entire library from the ancient Mediterranean been discovered in situ. On the eve of the catastrophe in 79 AD, Herculaneum was a chic resort town on the Bay of Naples, where many of Rome's top families went to rest and recuperate during the hot Italian summers. It was also a place where...