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Herculaneum occupies a headland on the Bay of Naples, 7 km northwest of Pompeii and directly west of Vesuvius. Unlike Pompeii, which was buried under meters of volcanic ash and pumice, Herculaneum was engulfed by a superheated pyroclastic surge moving at 160–180 km/h on the night of 24–25 August 79 CE. The material that covered it — a volcanic mud and rock mixture that later hardened to near-concrete — preserved organic material that has survived nowhere else in the Roman world: wooden beds, doors, and staircases; carbonized food on stoves; fabric impressions; and an extraordinary library at the Villa of the Papyri containing more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls, the only intact private library to survive from antiquity. The scrolls, mostly philosophical texts by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, were carbonized by the heat but are slowly being decoded using X-ray and AI-assisted imaging. Excavations have been partial: only a fraction of the town — roughly 4 hectares of an estimated 20 — has been uncovered. The Bourbon-era tunneling of the 18th century removed sculptures and objects with little documentation; systematic excavation began in the 1920s.
