"Vesuvius: Redated" Topic

A scrawled piece of text on a wall in Pompeii is rewriting the history of the famous ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius…

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Pliny got it wrong?
I doubt it.

The link to History.com still says August. I was trying top find the full text of the inscription (I don't do Facebook) and can't tell if it mentions the year – if it doesn't state the equivalent of AD79 then who knows when it was written – some Builders I know would take a year or more to complete a refurbishment.

This article is more useful link

Pliny got it wrong?
I doubt it.

Not that simple, if you read the link (and as advocate says, the BBC article is a bit clearer on this point) because we don't actually know what month Pliny originally wrote.

It is an interesting example of going back to the source (in this case Pliny). Most modern people used the August date as if it were a first-hand source, but the letter was written 20 years after the event, then transcribed and translated several times. But still historians did sometimes suggest dates other than August, based on Pliny's text.
It's also a rare example of an historical date getting confirmation by archaeology – the BBC story records other archaeological details that suggest a date in autumn rather than summer.

This didn't come unexpected. That Pliny was wrong, or that a medieval copyist did a mistake, had already been suggested by many researchers. Mainly because all the archeological evidence pointed to autumn season.

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At last there's an undeniable evidence