[HN Gopher] Records of Pompeii's survivors have been found
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Records of Pompeii's survivors have been found
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-06-08 18:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| spacecadet wrote:
| Nothing changes. A buddy always says nothing has actually changed
| in 20,000 years... Based on the description and other accounts of
| the bodies, sometimes found to be attached to the buildings...
| that the wealthy survived while abandoning anyone else not "worth
| it".
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Not all the survivors of the eruption were wealthy or went on
| to find success in their new communities_
|
| The guy lists 2 semi-wealthy survivors, then says the above. He
| also says:
|
| _I took Roman names unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum - such as
| Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius - and searched for people
| with those names who lived in surrounding communities in the
| period after the eruption._ and found _200 survivors in 12
| cities_
|
| So he's only searching on unique names, which is an
| (understandable) bias, and only found 200 out of thousands of
| people, while saying there are way too few bodies.
|
| There's literally zero evidence to support the fact that the
| rich bugged out, and only the poor died. In fact, there's
| evidence to the contrary, with multiple poor people found, and
| lots of those that didn't do well, their wealth unknown prior
| to te event.
|
| Frankly how would the rich even do that? Lots of houses, rich
| and poor, left with belongings. How would the rich prevent
| escape?
|
| Walking away was likely sufficient.
| csense wrote:
| Pretty neat.
|
| I'm a bit upset that, toward the end, the author puts politics in
| an article about history and archaeology, and does it poorly to
| boot.
|
| For their analogy of "How were the survivors treated today," they
| cite Border Patrol migrant camps and NYC tent cities.
|
| However, that's not really a good comparison. In both of those
| examples, the displaced people are foreigners fleeing political /
| economic disasters (or just seeking a better life).
|
| A closer comparison might be Hurricane Katrina, where the
| displaced people were (mostly) legal residents or citizens,
| fleeing a natural disaster.
| hnbad wrote:
| > the author puts politics in an article about history and
| archaeology
|
| That's a very "end of history" level of understanding of
| history and archaelogy. History is inherently political because
| it's shaped by our own politics as much as it is a study of the
| politics of the past. Even if we don't do it explicitly, we
| look at history through the lens of our present with all the
| baggage that means. And it can help reflect on similar
| situations in the present to learn both how humans handled
| those situations in the past and how that worked out.
|
| > and does it poorly to boot
|
| That I'm willing to agree on. It does seem apropos of nothing
| and very hamfisted even if I may agree with the author's
| general message. I think the problem is actually greater than
| you say: even the concept of "foreigners" vs "citizens" doesn't
| translate well as Rome distinguished between foreigners,
| residents and citizens differently than we do today and "race"
| didn't exist as a meaningful distinction in the same way. Even
| the nuances of the differences between different foreign
| "nations" worked differently so the concept of refugees doesn't
| really translate all that well to begin with.
| wslh wrote:
| > That's a very "end of history" level of understanding of
| history and archaelogy.
|
| No, yours is a kind of fallacy and called Presentism [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_anal
| ysi...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > A closer comparison might be Hurricane Katrina
|
| Who were notoriously housed in toxic trailer homes.
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| Yes. These were local people who could already function in the
| same kind of society and probably still had their wealth,
| business skills, social connections, etc. Even today, those
| types of refugees don't need to live in tents.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| It's just incredible that there are still records that exist that
| can be used to tell this story.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| A surviving historical account of the eruption, for those
| interested:
|
| > This is an English translation of the two letters written by
| Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian Tacitus. The first
| letter describes the journey of his uncle Pliny the Elder during
| which he perished. The second one describes his own observations
| in a town across the bay.
|
| https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...
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(page generated 2024-06-09 23:00 UTC)