Pompeii’s Urn: another investigative lead

UNCONVENTIONAL RESEARCH

2023

In the XVI century, Fontana first stirred the ground's Unconscious around the Sarno river valley, exposing the early fragments.

Pompeii is the preeminent case of how the repressed will always find a way to resurface and make its voice heard. The primary pattern that stresses — almost like the Dnipro's skulls — how our bodies, in their corporal memory, are and will become admirable ruins. How the intensities of a Geoshock materialised as pyroclastic flow, entombed and froze in time the living. The ancient city's bodies, caught by the Geoviolence, had just the time to leave behind a trace-void — like the negative of a film — that Fiorelli decided to fill with plaster to reconstruct them in eerie sculptures revealing their final moments of pain and fear. This relationship between the flesh and the monument (ruins) is not a novelty, as I discovered in a recently uncovered artefact. A (probable) cinerary urn — almost like an uncanny omen — unfolds within its inscriptions this credo (a sentence for each of the top sides):

Memento Mortuos Tuos / Remember your dead (people).

Mortui Vivos Docent / The dead (people) teach the living.

Ruinae Futurum Aedificant / The ruins build the future.

Refice Tuas Ruinas / Rebuild your ruins.

Rebuild your dead — recreate their past in your present and let them speak to you — to rebuild your lost future.

Sentences that relate to each other, paralleling stones to bones, urging to remember those who fell and to rebuild the ruins to be taught the present — to rebuild the bodies to be taught the future — to give voice to the dead (the past) to lecture the living (the present). The cinerary urn seems a monument itself within its shapes — the straight lines deprived of the usual decorations — are encrusted with what appears to be calcified layers of ash but still can be retraced at its bottom a series of engraved skulls and debossed traces of Carnations' flower petals in its middle section. As the urn has been found in what has been named "The Garden of Hercules" — identified as the Pompeii commercial flower garden — it is believed that the thermal shock of the volcanic eruption caused the petals' impression. However, I find it hard to believe it was a casualty. First, why should a cinerary urn have been in a flower market? As the function of some newly discovered areas in "The Garden of Hercules" is still a mystery, perhaps those spaces were dedicated to preserving such funerary artefacts and given the monumental features lying among flowers, almost like tombstones in a cemetery. But, the symbolism of Carnations led me to believe that it was an intentional act to incorporate their petals in what seemed clay. In Ancient Greek mythology, the first Carnation arose from a dead body and in Ancient Rome, due to its pink colour, the name Carnation is derived from the Latin "caro" and "carnis" signified "flesh". Actually, with a more attentive analysis — almost with Necromantic significance — the inscription can be read (as interchangeable units of a larger discourse placed at their opposite sides and side-by-side order) as: 

"Remember to rebuild your dead to teach the ruins of the future" (?)

The "Cinerary Urn of Hercules Garden" was recovered during major excavations in August 2023. The artefact is currently exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

If anyone has more information on the history of Pompeii or has an idea about the artefact reported, please contact me.