Another Pompeii...?

The 'Pompeii analogy' is very evocative. It conveys an image of a city instantly frozen in time, like an ancient insect trapped in amber. It suggests survival of a near-perfect snapshot of otherwise vanished ancient life. But for Dura it also proves to be rather misleading.

Indeed, in some ways, Dura surpasses Pompeii itself. A special dry micro-environment along the city walls perfectly preserved leather, textiles and papyrus documents, items which did not survive at Pompeii. However, the remains at Dura were not sealed for eternity on a single day as Pompeii supposedly was by the ashes of Vesuvius.

The siege which destroyed Dura apparently lasted months. Many of the city's greatest treasures had already been buried before this, in massive preparations anticipating attack, shrouded in a great earth embankment reinforcing the city walls. Once the defences were breached, the Iranian conquerors had time to thoroughly loot the city before abandoning it. However, much of Dura's wealth was probably already long gone by then.

Recent research suggests that the civil population had already fled several years before the siege. It also seems that the city was briefly occupied by the Sasanians around 252-3 before being retaken by the Romans in 254, leaving a restored garrison to strengthen and defend the walls of a town already heavily battered before the final siege. The physical remains of the living city were, then, massively transformed over a period of years before it was abandoned--a process never entirely complete anyway. Christian hermits and Muslim farmers later sometimes lived there, although they did not greatly disturb the remains.

Paradoxically, this more complex history actually makes Dura like the real, rather than imagined, Pompeii. When Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii, too, had already been heavily changed by recent prior events. It was still recovering from a massive earthquake. And after the eruption, there was much more disturbance of the buried remains by recovery or looting efforts than is commonly understood. The 'Pompeii analogy' doesn't fully apply to Pompeii either...