They discover a prison-mill in Pompeii the place slaves and donkeys grind grain | EUROtoday

This “bakery-prison” has emerged in what is named “Regio IX” of Pompeii, the place work is presently being carried out to safe this peripheral and uninvestigated space of ​​the location.

The archaeologists of the location of Pompeiithe town devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius two millennia in the past, they’ve discovered the stays of a room the place slaves and donkeys They had been compelled to grind the grain throughout “massacring” days.

This “bakery-prison” has emerged in what is named “Regio IX” of Pompeii, the place work is presently being carried out to safe this peripheral and uninvestigated space of ​​the location, its managers reported at the moment in a press release.

It is a “narrow receptacle, with no external exit, with small windows with iron bars to allow the entry of light”, the place servants and donkeys had been locked as much as grind the cereals with which they then cooked the bread.

The discovery was made by excavating a home that, as used to occur within the historical roman metropolis Destroyed in 79 AD, it was divided right into a residential space, adorned with refined frescoes, and a productive space, on this case a bakery.

In reality, within the amenities of this home bread-making manufacturing unit, 3 victims of the eruptionwhich confirms that this home was nonetheless inhabited.

The discovering permits us to higher describe how the manufacturing system labored of Pompeii however, above all, the cruelest aspect of slavery, by which there was no relationship between the grasp and his servant (in historical Rome the freedmen, slaves freed by their grasp for various causes, constituted virtually a social class) .

The worst and most merciless face of slavery in historical Rome has an distinctive testimony, that of the second century author Apuleius, who in his “Metamorphosis” narrates the lifetime of Lucius, a person changed into a donkey and bought, exhibiting the harshness of slavery. actuality of these contemporaries of his lowered to beasts of burden.

It is “molino-prisin” present in Pompeya It doesn’t even have doorways and its solely exit results in the atrium of the home of lords.

“It is the most disconcerting face of ancient slavery, in which there was no relationship of trust and was reduced to bestial violence,” mentioned the final director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, within the assertion.

In the grinding space, subsequent to the secure, a manger has been discovered and, across the grinding space, on a volcanic basalt pavement, a collection of round marks that – it’s believed – served to stop the animals from they slipped.

Iconographic and literary sources from Ancient Rome, such because the reliefs from the tomb of the wealthy baker Eurysaces in Rome, who had an oven-shaped tomb constructed nonetheless seen at the moment, counsel that molars had been often moved by a donkey and a slave. .

This final one, In addition to shifting the stone that grinds the grain, should management the motion of the animal.