Posted
on May 24, 2014
On
this date in 1578, some workers just outside of Rome, Italy, were
digging up some pozzolano earth to be used to make cement. And
they discovered something very cool. Or maybe very creepy!
The
Catacombs.
The workers discovered a stairway going downward, underground, and opening out to a series of narrow rooms or galleries that had been carved out of rock.
And
the creepy part is that these were burial galleries!
When
the Catacombs were discovered by accident, there was some excitement,
but nobody put the effort in to study them. But in 1593 a young man
named Antonio Bosio decided that they were interesting – and
important! - and he began to explore them.
He
explored the Catacombs for more than 27 years! Basically, he explored
them for the rest of his life.
 |
| Some of the walls in some catacombs were decorated with paintings. |
I read that, if you laid out all the branching galleries end to end, they would stretch the length of the country of Italy! (And yet all these lie just outside the city of Rome.) I also read that the estimate of the number of bodies buried in the Catacombs is about two million...Crazy, huh?!
The
people buried in the Catacombs were Jews and (mostly) early
Christians who lived in Rome. Apparently ancient Romans cremated
their dead and kept the ashes in family tombs, but the Jews who lived
in Rome followed the Jewish tradition of burial. Because the graves
in Palestine were mostly tombs cut into rock, covered with slabs of
stone, the Jews of Rome carved out similar rock tombs underground.
And since early Christianity was considered a sect of Judaism, so did
the early Christians.
Bosio ended up writing a book called Roma Sotterranea (Underground Rome), in which he carefully described many of the catacombs he had explored. Modern scholars are grateful that he did this, because some of the catacombs he had explored have since been destroyed.
 |
| Some of the catacombs are decorated with artistically arranged bones. |
Under
Rome and the land surrounding Rome is a thick layer of tuff
(sometimes called tufa). This volcanic rock is made from
layers of ash spewed from volcanoes and washed down into low-lying
areas. The ash is pressed together by additional layers of ash and
soil, and it hardens into rock.
Although
the tuff found in some places of the world is pretty brittle—even
fragile—the tuff that is the bedrock of Rome is pretty strong. Many
ancient and even modern Roman buildings have been built of blocks of
tuff.
Still,
I imagine that tuff is a little easier to carve into than some sorts
of rock. It was probably ideal for creating rock graves—and that's
why the catacombs were used for so long, by so many.
When
Christianity became the official religion of Rome, in 380, various
buildings and temples were torn down or changed to become churches,
and burials began to be in more familiar churchyards and cemeteries.
Eventually the catacombs were forgotten, their stairway-entrances
buried—perhaps for a thousand years—until that accidental
discovery on May 31, 1578.
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