Cuneiform was still being written shortly before Pompeii was buried.
The last known cuneiform tablet, an astronomical text, dates to about AD 75 — four years before Vesuvius erupted — when the script was over 3,200 years old.
The events
- Invention of writing in Sumerc. 3200 BC · Uruk. Scribes in the Sumerian city of Uruk began recording accounts with signs on clay tablets, which evolved into cuneiform. One of the world's first writing systems, it shaped Near Eastern culture for three millennia.
- Eruption of Vesuvius79 · Pompeii. Vesuvius buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under ash and pyroclastic flows; the scholar Pliny the Elder died in the disaster. The entombed towns preserved a frozen snapshot of everyday Roman life for archaeologists.
More amazing facts
- 77 Pliny the Elder complained of gold draining east: India, China and Arabia, he wrote, take a hundred million sesterces from the empire every year. 'That is what our luxuries and women cost us.'
- 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
- 79 · 80 The Colosseum opened a year after Pompeii was buried, under the same emperor.
- 79 · 1752 The only library from antiquity to survive whole was saved by Vesuvius.
- 79 · 1592 · 1748 Pompeii was first struck in 1592, and tunnelled straight through.
- 79 · 600 The Americas have their own Pompeii, five centuries younger than Italy's. Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79; volcanic ash buried the Maya village of Joya de Cerén in El Salvador around AD 600.