Prison Bakery Excavated at Pompeii Stuns Researcher With Its Brutal History
People are familiar with the disaster of Pompeii in 97 C.E., a city that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The ash and lava from the volcanic eruption buried countless structures and histories attached to the city under layers of debris. However, researchers have continued trying to find elements from the period when Pompeii flourished and they stumbled upon an ancient bakery, stated Pompeii Sites. Surprisingly enough, the bakery also doubled as a workplace for enslaved laborers.
The enslaved people had to toil for grueling hours in cruel conditions alongside donkeys to grind grains for bread as the Regio IX site in Pompeii served as a prison. The bakery's space was cramped and people working there had little access to light that entered the building from small windows which were built at a height and were barred. "It is, in other words, a space in which we have to imagine the presence of people of servile status whose freedom of movement the owner felt the need to restrict," Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said in a statement.
"It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery, the one devoid of both trusting relationships and promises of manumission, where we were reduced to brute violence, an impression that is entirely confirmed by the securing of the few windows with iron bars," he continued. The donkeys in the bakery pushed a grindstone and workers had to keep adding grains and check the process to collect flour. The researchers also found certain markings on the floor of the bakery that indicated how the laborers used to coordinate the movements of animals and humans.
"The space was so small that two donkeys could not pass at the same time, so they always had to be careful to keep in some kind of synchrony with the others," Zuchtriegel told the New York Times. Zuchtriegel explained that the indentations on the ground helped with the working process. Many ancient written accounts also proved how mills and bakeries had bleak working conditions. An author from the 2nd century named Apuleius used the knowledge he gathered from those places and described them in poetic format.
He mentioned that most of the workers had welt marks on their skins and some had their foreheads branded while others had their feet chained together. "They were wretchedly sallow too, their eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness, they could barely see," Apuleius wrote, according to Poetry in Translation. "Like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash." The donkeys did not live any better than humans. They were blindfolded and forced to walk in circles for hours.
"Their flanks were cut to the bone from relentless whipping," Apuleius detailed. "Their hooves distorted to strange dimensions from the repetitive circling and their whole hide blotched by mange and hollowed by starvation. They were wretchedly sallow too, their eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness, that they could barely see. Like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash."
Previous excavation works in the region also unearthed a fresco that featured a flatbread and an electoral campaign inscription. "This find is a testimony of the backbreaking work to which men, women, and animals were subjected in the ancient mill-bakeries," Zuchtriegel said in a video posted on the YouTube channel Pompeii.