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MICHAEL SCOTT: In a labyrinth of ancient Roman tombs,
a mysterious chamber comes to light.
Thousands of bodies stacked on top of each other.
This is an incredibly unusual discovery.
A mass grave from the days of a golden empire
sends archaeologists on a hunt for answers.
(speaking French)
PHILIPPE BLANCHARD (translated): The body has the appearance
of a sort of mummy.
That's quite an unusual custom.
SCOTT: What killed so many people so quickly?
Could these be the bodies of Christian martyrs?
Or victims of a deadly plague?
A chance find.
A tomb that confounds all expectations.
And multiple mass deaths.
SCOTT: "Roman Catacomb Mystery"--
right now on NOVA.
SCOTT: Beneath the streets of modern-day Rome
lies a network of interconnected tunnels
that stretch for hundreds of miles...
A giant underground cemetery.
These are Rome's catacombs.
They are over 1,500 years old
and they contain many of Rome's ancient dead.
In 2003, deep within this subterranean labyrinth,
a bricked-up tomb was discovered
unlike anything seen before in Rome.
BLANCHARD (translated): I had never excavated a site
with so many bodies.
Quite unreal.
DOMINIQUE CASTEX (translated): The burials here are quite unlike
the other burials in the rest of this funeral complex.
SCOTT: Typically, in Roman catacombs,
the graves are neat and orderly
with individual bodies carefully placed into niches.
But that's not what the archaeologists find here.
This was an ancient mass grave,
piled high with thousands of skeletons.
This is an incredibly unusual discovery--
tombs packed full of bodies, layered on top of one another.
You just don't expect to find this type of burial
in a Roman catacomb.
I'm Michael Scott, and as a classical historian,
I've studied burials across the Roman world,
but I've never seen anything like this.
Who were these people?
What did they die of and why are they buried here
in this extraordinary manner?
For the last ten years,
an international team have been trying to find out.
The archaeological detectives are looking for clues
in the layout of the tomb,
in personal possessions,
and in the bones themselves.
(translated): Our aim is to try and understand who they were,
so in some way bring them back to life.
SCOTT: But with each new clue,
that task will become more difficult
than they ever imagined.
Rome's catacombs have been explored and excavated
for centuries.
By and large, their use, their layout, their architecture
are fairly well understood.
But then a chance discovery in one of these catacombs
opened up a whole new mystery.
Behind a nondescript door on the outskirts of Rome...
lies the catacomb of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter.
Here, in the summer of 2003, a burst water main
causes the roof in one of the tunnels to collapse.
The hundreds of miles of tunnels that make up the Roman catacombs
fall under the jurisdiction of the Vatican.
Inspector Raffaella Giuliani is sent in to investigate.
(speaking Italian)
GIULIANI (translated): Just above us is the place where the hole opened
and started this whole adventure.
SCOTT: The collapsed ceiling revealed a medieval fresco.
The painting is believed to show
the two fourth-century patron saints of the catacomb--
Marcellinus, a priest...
and Peter, an exorcist.
They appear to be standing guard over a burial chamber.
When we find early Medieval frescos in catacombs,
they are usually connected to the presence
of a martyr's tomb.
SCOTT: In the centuries before the Roman Emperor
converted from paganism to Christianity,
Christians were persecuted,
sometimes rounded up and massacred
in amphitheatres all over the Roman Empire like the Coliseum.
The religious painting in the catacomb
raises expectations for a martyr's tomb.
But nothing could prepare Raffaella
for what lies hidden behind the fresco.
We found these spaces almost entirely full of skeletons
piled on top of each other.
SCOTT: They have uncovered a mass grave.
The burial site is located in an area
of the Vatican's underground mapping system, labeled "X".
They come to be known as the "X Tombs."
So are the X Tombs the last resting place
of hundreds of Christian martyrs?
To find out, the Vatican seeks specialist help.
A team of French archaeologists are called in,
led by Dominique Castex and Philippe Blanchard.
Both are experienced in excavating ancient mass graves.
What were your first impressions the first time you came here?
(translated): When I entered, I discovered a huge number of bones.
There wasn't enough room to move so we had to squeeze in.
SCOTT: As excavations begin, six more chambers are uncovered,
each piled high with bodies.
The tombs are arranged on three separate levels,
all located around a central hub.
We need to completely forget these modern walls here,
which are actually working as foundations to stop
the six meters or so of rock above our heads
from collapsing on us.
This is the crucial bit,
this is the largest of the burial chambers
and the archaeologists estimate that it's just under a meter,
about 80 centimeters left of compressed bodies
still to excavate.
There's another tomb there that was full of bodies
that the archaeologists have now removed.
And there's one, two, three burial chambers behind us.
So when we stand here,
we are surrounded by chambers of mass death.
All together, the archaeologists estimate the tombs contain
the bodies of at least 2,000 people.
Picking their way through the bones,
a few personal possessions come to light.
A pair of earrings...
A hairpin...
And a small black ring.
They also unearth a few coins.
The bones themselves reveal more clues.
CASTEX (translated): You can see connected bones in some places.
Here you have a whole vertebral column with the pelvis.
Oh yes, a pelvis.
CASTEX: Continuing with a femur.
The corpses were brought here and decomposed here.
It was not just a case of throwing bones in.
SCOTT: Most of bodies are in similar positions--
with their shoulders compressed, hands resting on the pelvis,
and their legs stretched out straight with ankles touching.
The fact the skeletons are still intact
and are packed so closely together
with very little soil between the layers of bodies
suggests that large numbers were buried here at the same time.
BLANCHARD (translated): They're all relatively well laid out
on their stomachs or on their backs.
The bodies were carefully laid out side by side,
head to foot and vice versa
to bury the maximum number of people
in an extremely restricted space.
This has to have been something of a mass death moment--
what archaeologists call a crisis event--
multiple people dying within a very short space of time.
To find out more, the team makes a detailed study
of one of the tombs where all the bodies have been excavated.
By digitally restoring the flesh to the bone,
a computer program calculates
the original volume of the bodies.
And the results are completely unexpected
because the bodies don't fit.
The volume of all the bodies
was bigger than the size of the room.
SCOTT: This means that the bodies
could not all have been laid out at once.
There isn't enough space.
Some bodies must have been placed in the tomb
after the bodies below had already decomposed.
But because the bodies tend to be stacked together so neatly,
we think they were placed here in waves--
the victims of a series of mass death events.
For centuries, during the age of the Roman republic
with its famous figures like Julius Caesar
and the early Roman Empire
under emperors like Augustus,
the Romans buried their dead
in cemeteries just outside the city.
In fact, the area directly above the X Tombs--
now a bustling suburb of Rome-- was once a cemetery.
Remnants of gravestones, recycled in the catacombs below,
reveal that the upper cemetery was the resting place
for the Emperor's elite cavalry guard.
But as the population of Rome expanded
during the second and third centuries,
the space available became increasingly limited,
so they started burying people in underground cemeteries.
Rome was built on a soft volcanic rock called tufa,
which could be carved out by hand.
These sprawling subterranean graveyards--
the Roman catacombs-- grew rapidly under the city,
but they look quite different
from the chambers of the X Tombs.
Despite the fact that the corridors
in a typical catacomb meander every which way,
the layout of the dead was actually fairly regularized.
You had your individual tombs, called loculi.
Burials in most catacombs were neat and orderly,
with a special shelf for each individual body.
I always refer to them as bunk beds.
There's still the bones of one poor individual left there.
And if you wanted something a bit more special
then you could have a cubicula,
a bedroom for the entire family to be put to rest in.
As excavations continue,
the bones from the X Tombs are removed
and kept in a makeshift store room for further analysis.
So far the French team have made a detailed study
of around 500 bodies.
They're starting to build up a picture
of who these people were.
From the pelvis bones,
they can tell there is a mixture of men and women.
The size and stage of development of the femur bones
also gives an idea of their age when they died.
CASTEX (translated): We have a right femur that would form a joint here.
And the head is fully formed, there is no sign of fusing,
so it is an adult femur.
Are most of them adults?
There are a large quantity of bones
which range from teenagers and young adults.
SCOTT: These people certainly didn't die of old age.
But are there any signs of trauma?
If the bones are those of Christian martyrs,
we would expect to find clear marks of violence.
But here in the X Tombs, not a scratch.
Out of 500 individuals you would expect to find evidence of blows
or injuries on the skeletons, which we do not have.
SCOTT: None of the bones show any signs of trauma
that one would expect if someone had been crucified
or indeed if they died in battle in some sort of massacre.
Despite the fresco of saints outside the tomb,
there's no evidence that these are Christian martyrs.
So who were they and why were they buried down here like this?
The first step is to try to find out when they died.
One way to establish a possible date for the tomb's occupants
is to study the handful of personal belongings
uncovered amongst the bones.
These earrings were made from fine gold.
They have a design that became popular in the first century.
This ring is made of the semi-precious stone jet,
which Romans thought held magical powers.
Studying its chemical composition,
the archaeologists conclude it came all the way
from northern England in the third century.
Then there are the coins,
possibly left as payment to enter the afterlife.
Their age is much easier to establish.
The oldest coin is of the tenth emperor, Titus,
dating from the first century.
The wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius features on another,
as does the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,
both from the second century.
The last coin was of Emperor Gordian.
It's a rarer find than the others.
He only reigned for three weeks in the third century.
Coins are fantastic; they really help us
narrow down our range, but there are caveats.
You carry coins around in your pocket for a long time--
they exist in circulation for ages--
and the archaeological contexts here
in which these coins were found are not secure.
To try and get a more accurate date for the bones,
the archaeologists use radiocarbon dating.
Surprisingly, the different chambers of the X Tombs
come back with different results.
The bodies from the two larger chambers
date from the second and third centuries.
But some of the bodies from the smaller tombs
date from the first century.
These dates suggest the first burials took place
before the use of underground catacombs became widespread.
And possibly up to 200 years before the corridors
surrounding the X Tombs were built.
This is an exciting revelation.
The X Tombs could be among the oldest underground tombs
found anywhere in Rome.
The dating provided by the coins and the bones
and the other finds indicate that these people died
between the end of the first century AD
and the early part of the third century AD.
Now, that period of time in Roman history
was by all accounts a golden age.
Some of Rome's finest imperial buildings were completed
between the first and third centuries--
the Coliseum;
great bath complexes;
and ever larger public forums.
The people of the X Tombs, whoever they were,
were living at the center of a vast and powerful empire.
At its height, the Roman Empire spanned three continents--
two million square miles.
And its territories stretched from North Africa, Egypt,
the Middle East, Asia Minor, across Europe
and northwest to the borders of Scotland.
At the very heart of it was Rome, caput mundi--
the capital of the world.
Rome was a multicultural city full of people and products
from around the empire and beyond.
This was the ancient world's greatest metropolis,
with a population of over a million.
This cosmopolitan melting pot
is where the people of the X Tombs lived...
and died.
At their lab in Bordeaux,
the French team are searching for more clues
to the possible identity of these people.
Kevin Salesse is analyzing the chemical makeup
of the bones and teeth
in a process called isotopic analysis.
This looks at the various atomic forms, or isotopes,
of chemical elements like oxygen and carbon
found in organic remains.
The minerals in your teeth are set when you are a young child
and they don't change throughout your life,
whereas your bones keep remodeling themselves,
so they tell us about where you spent
the last part of your life.
And by comparing the two,
we can find out whether these people were originally from Rome
or whether they came from elsewhere
and migrated to the city.
The first isotope Kevin is looking at
is a rare form of oxygen called oxygen-18.
Nearly all of the oxygen found in our teeth and bones
comes from the water we drink.
And that comes mainly from rain.
The amount of oxygen-18 in rainfall
varies from place to place,
depending on climate and location,
including distance from the ocean.
By looking at the oxygen-18 in bones and teeth,
Kevin can get an idea of where an individual was born and lived
and compare it to a typical native Roman.
SALESSE (translated): Here are the results from the teeth
and here you have the results from the bone samples.
SCOTT: The teeth and bones of native Romans typically have
levels of oxygen-18 that lie within the red zone.
But the teeth and bones from the X Tombs
fall outside this zone.
This shows that the people of the X Tombs
were not born in Rome, and even as adults they traveled around.
(translated): The bones tell us the last years of their lives.
These individuals most likely moved
from one region to another region,
so this group is characterized by great mobility.
SCOTT: According to Kevin's research,
the oxygen-18 levels indicate
that some of the people of the X Tombs
may have come from northern Europe,
others from across the Mediterranean, northern Africa.
And by studying isotopes of nitrogen and carbon,
Kevin is even able to explore
what foods they might have eaten.
The bones from the X Tombs reveal a diet
rich in meat and fish, more than the average Roman,
who lived mainly on grains and beans.
These people must have been fairly wealthy for their time.
What's coming through very strongly
in the archaeological analysis
is that the people of the X Tombs were not from Rome.
They came to Rome but where they were from initially,
well, that's a question
that the archaeology is still struggling with.
There are some indications it may have been
Central Europe, but also from elsewhere.
This does not seem to have been a homogenous population
all from the same place.
But they came to Rome, they lived in Rome,
and they died all together in Rome.
The French team are starting to build a picture
of who these people were and how they lived,
but they also want to find out how they died.
We know they weren't martyred.
We know from the dating that bodies were deposited here
possibly over a 200-year period.
We also know they were carefully packed in,
several layers deep at a time,
and that there were a series of separate mass burials.
What the archaeology is showing is fascinating.
Piles of bodies were put in these tombs
on top of already partly decomposed bodies.
So what we've got is waves of mass death.
We know it wasn't massacres,
so the best hypothesis for what could have caused this
has to be disease.
Disease was rampant in the capital,
from tuberculosis to typhoid, leprosy to malaria.
During the time of the X Tombs,
diseases like these are thought to have killed
over 30,000 residents each year.
It's really not surprising
when you realize how most Romans lived.
The majority of the population lived
in the world's first high-rise apartment blocks.
They were called insulae, or islands,
and there were thousands of them densely packed into the city.
This is the Insula d'Ara Coeli.
It dates from the second century
and would have stood at least five stories tall.
Down there is the ancient Roman ground level.
That's where the floor was
and the first level there are shops and inns,
and then as you go up you get the private apartments.
But, you know what,
you wouldn't want to be in the penthouse here.
While the lower floors were rented to wealthy tenants,
the upper levels were for the less well off.
The apartments were smaller,
the number of people in each room increased,
and living conditions were just awful.
Aqueducts brought in fresh water
and the city had an impressive drainage system.
But the people of Rome still lived in filth.
All the trash and garbage were thrown into the streets
and none of these apartments had toilets connected to the drains,
so human and animal waste ended up in the street too.
The people of the X Tombs may have lived
during Rome's golden age, but the streets of the capital
were more like an open sewer.
Disease raged through the city.
And there was no escape, even at the famous baths.
The Romans loved their baths.
It was a great place to relax, soak, have a massage,
scrub down, chat with friends, catch up on gossip.
The people of the X Tombs would have likely gone to the baths.
The baths were part of the social glue
that bound all Romans together.
The baths were attended by rich and poor, young and old,
healthy and diseased.
In fact, we know that Roman doctors actually prescribed
a good soak in the baths for all sorts of ailments.
So if you had everything from boils to rabies,
from diarrhea to tuberculosis, you came to the baths.
The sick and the healthy bathed together
because the Romans had no real idea of how disease spread.
The baths really were
the perfect place to catch a disease,
and new strains of disease
were constantly being brought into the city by traders,
migrants and soldiers.
It's easy to imagine how the people of the X Tombs
might have succumbed to waves of infection.
To try to find out what disease might have killed them,
the French team bring in a world expert
in reconstructing ancient DNA.
Johannes Krause is a professor of paleo-genetics.
His previous work studied the Black Death,
which struck Europe in the 14th century, killing millions.
By extracting DNA from bones from a mass grave site
in Central London,
he proved that the culprit behind the Black Death
was Yersinia pestis,
the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.
Here in the X Tombs he faces a far greater challenge.
The bones are much older.
There may be very little DNA left behind
from any disease-causing microbes or pathogens.
So, what we want to have
is the genetic material of the pathogen itself,
so we're trying to find places in the skeleton
that still might have the pathogen DNA preserved
and what we have found
is the best container for the genetic information
are actually teeth.
SCOTT: How do you pick the particular teeth
that you're going to work with?
KRAUSE: We try to identify teeth that are still intact,
that don't have a crack or some hole in the surface,
and inside those teeth we might have a little bit of dried blood
where the pathogen DNA might still be present.
So we can actually see that the jaw is just sticking out here;
you can actually see these teeth here being exposed
and it's just perfect to actually get in here.
Yes-- yes, it comes out.
Perfect.
Look at that-- wow.
SCOTT: Oh, my God, you see how wet that is as well.
KRAUSE: That's a molar from the left lower jaw.
SCOTT: Okay.
SCOTT: The teeth are photographed, catalogued and bagged up,
ready for transportation back to his lab in Germany.
KRAUSE: Hopefully we have a little bit of the pathogen DNA
that we can also get out of those teeth,
and then reconstruct the DNA, reconstruct the entire genome.
SCOTT: Johannes believes that some of the people here in the X Tombs
might have been killed by one of the most virulent epidemics
ever to strike the Roman Empire.
This devastating disease was first recorded
around the year 165,
when the Empire was ruled by two brothers.
It was called the Antonine plague
because of the family name of the two brothers,
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Verus.
Lucius Verus may have succumbed to the disease.
It's uncertain where the Antonine plague came from.
There were reports it started in the Middle East,
but the disease swept through the Roman army,
just at the time when the empire was challenged
by invasions from the north.
It wasn't long before the Antonine plague passed
into the civilian population.
The Roman Empire was a vast, integrated,
connected trading network
which also contributed to the plague being able
to spread so far so quickly.
It was in Italy, it was in parts of Central Europe,
it was in the east, it was in Egypt.
There is even one report that it made it as far as China.
And of course as the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome.
When the plague struck the capital,
there was panic and public hysteria.
Priests were summoned and religious rites performed
to purify the city.
The people of the X Tombs would have been vulnerable
just like everyone else.
According to Roman consul and writer Dio Cassius,
2,000 people often died in Rome in a single day.
In his books, the emperor's physician Galen describes
some of the symptoms of the Antonine plague:
a fever, a rash, diarrhea, foul-smelling feces,
an ulceration of the windpipe
and dry pustular eruptions on the skin.
No one knows for sure what disease was responsible
for the Antonine plague.
We do know it claimed more lives
than any previously recorded epidemic.
Across the empire,
something like five million people were killed,
up to a tenth of the entire Roman population.
The plague struck in waves that lasted from 165 to 180,
then again in 189.
It's entirely possible
that some of the people in the X Tombs
living in Rome at that time
were killed by this disease that shook the empire.
In his lab in Germany,
Johannes Krause and his colleague Kirsten Bos
are trying to extract DNA
from the teeth samples taken from the tombs.
(drill whirring)
KRAUSE: I drill out the pulp from inside the tooth,
which is now powder.
That powder now goes into a solution
where the DNA gets released from the bone.
So our answer could be in that tube?
KRAUSE: I hope so very much.
SCOTT: This process creates a mixture of billions of DNA molecules.
But because the samples are very easily contaminated,
the cocktail will contain not just DNA from the bones
and potential disease microbes,
but also DNA from soil microbes that were present in the tomb.
KRAUSE: It's kind of like looking for the needle in a haystack.
So you have billions of molecules
that we get out of those teeth,
and maybe just a few hundred come from the pathogen.
So there is a lot of sorting and then there is a lot of puzzling.
SCOTT: To isolate any fragments of DNA left over from bacteria
or viral pathogens, Johannes has adapted a technique
known as "DNA hybridization capture."
He calls it "fishing."
On this glass slide are 100 short, single strands
of synthetic pathogen DNA.
They include the genetic codes of everything from smallpox
to measles, typhus, to bubonic plague.
The cocktail of DNA from each tooth
is then added to the slide.
The synthetic strands now act as "bait" to hook out
any actual pathogen DNA from the solution.
DNA is a double strand of chemicals,
each strand containing a string of four chemical bases,
represented by the letters G, A, T and C.
These two strands only stick together
when the bases match up precisely:
C to G, and A to T.
DNA has this double strand
where you have the bases facing each other
and there is always this A facing with the T
and you have the G facing with the C.
And this creates the famous double helix...
Exactly.
...that everyone knows, the kind of picture of DNA.
And just if the right sequence kind of matches
the opposite sequence,
those DNA fragments will actually bind
and form the double bond.
If they don't match, they will not come together.
It's like a magnet basically.
It only kind of pulls the DNA together if the strands matches.
So only the pathogen DNA would bind here.
SCOTT: But Johannes is pushing this technique to its limits.
It's never been used to "fish"
for so many possible causes of ancient disease.
KRAUSE: We have not just looked
for a single pathogen,
but we have actually looked for hundreds of them in parallel
because we don't know what has killed those people
and we don't know if it was one or several pathogens
that were spreading in that population during that time.
SCOTT: Johannes and his team are just beginning their search.
Even if they manage to isolate DNA
from a disease-causing bacteria or virus,
it could then take months or even years of computer analysis,
comparing millions of genetic sequences,
to identify which specific pathogen was the cause of death.
This technology, this science represents
the best chance we have of finding out
what killed the people of the X Tombs.
But for now, the mystery of the deadly disease remains unsolved.
One mystery the archaeologists may be able to crack
is the identity of the people themselves.
The French team have been doing tests on a white powder
that was found in the tombs.
BLANCHARD (translated): It was very odd.
Right from the start we found this whitish material
covering the bodies.
Our first reaction was to think it was lime.
Lime is often used to prevent the bodies from putrefying
and from disease spreading.
We had some tests done and when we got the results,
it turned out that the material was actually plaster.
SCOTT: It's unusual to find plaster in traditional Roman burials.
And this plaster contained further clues
about how the bodies were buried.
BLANCHARD: We can see particularly well
a small imprint which is in fact traces of fabric
which have become imprinted on the plaster.
SCOTT: The presence of plaster and fabric suggests these bodies
may have been bound in an intricate shroud,
which has since disintegrated.
This would explain why the shoulders were compressed,
hands resting on the pelvis,
legs stretched out with ankles touching.
And in amongst the skeletons and plaster,
a second curious substance was discovered.
BLANCHARD: In certain chambers,
in direct contact with the bones, we uncovered
a very large quantity of very fine red flakes,
rather like small crystals.
In fact, the flakes turned out to be amber, red amber.
SCOTT: Amber was a very expensive material.
It was used in burial sites to ensure safe passage
to the afterlife.
But it's rarely been found in this ground-up form,
and never in this quantity.
In all, several pounds were recovered from the tombs.
One piece in the puzzle was nearly overlooked altogether.
I was with Dominique.
We were leaning over a skeleton, when I saw this gold thread.
I said to Dominique, "Have you lost a strand of hair?"
She answered, "No, no."
"Well, in that case, I think we've found a gold thread!"
This was at the beginning.
The more we dug, the more gold threads we found,
sometimes heavily concentrated
on the shoulders and collarbones,
bands of gold threads.
Sometimes just small fragments.
SCOTT: Could the people have been buried
dressed in gold-embroidered clothes?
What began as just a mass of bones
is beginning to come into focus a little.
We've got a large number of individuals,
who are all carefully laid out.
Mostly adults, articulated one by the other.
And then there are all these strange finds:
the white powders, the red powders.
And then there's the fine gold thread,
what they thought to be Dominique's hair.
We're getting a clear picture now
of an elaborate and expensive burial ritual
for what seem to be some wealthy and distinctive people.
In Bordeaux, more clues are coming to light.
One of the French team, Delphine Henri, has been studying
remnants of the fabrics that were embedded
in the tiny pieces of plaster recovered from the tombs.
HENRI (translated): There are different layers of fabric.
You can see very clearly we have coarse fabrics,
finer fabrics and some very fine fabrics in certain places.
The fine luxury fabrics were made by professional weavers.
The coarser fabrics were probably made at home.
SCOTT: Delphine believes she can even work out
where the person who made the fabrics came from
by closely examining individual threads in the cloth.
HENRI: A thread is made by twisting the fibers,
and traditionally this was done using a spindle.
In the northern Mediterranean, the spindle is held at the top
and most people, being right-handed, give it a twist,
which produces a thread called a "Z" twist.
SCOTT (translated): So the Z twist is European?
You could say mainland Europe.
And in the southern Mediterranean,
they tended to hold the spindle at the bottom
and so produced an S-shaped twist.
SCOTT: Delphine found fabrics
made both with the Z and the S-shaped twist.
But it's the coarser fabrics she finds most intriguing,
because they often display the S-twist,
in the tradition of the southern Mediterranean.
Since these fabrics were probably made at home,
it is likely that the people from the X Tombs
were either themselves from the southern Mediterranean
or had slaves from that region.
Philippe believes
this cultural connection with the southern Mediterranean
can be narrowed further, to North Africa.
En revanche, le fait de recouvrir...
(translated): The practice of completely covering the corpse
from head to foot in plaster
does lend the body the appearance of a sort of mummy.
That's quite an unusual custom.
That was really a burial practice
that came from northern Africa.
Probably in the region of Tunisia or Algeria,
because we find it a lot there.
SCOTT: All this evidence points to these people being outsiders
who had traveled around Europe and the Mediterranean
and eventually came to Rome.
Their diet, their jewelry, the gold threads
all indicate they were relatively wealthy.
So who were they?
I think a very important clue
may be in the location of the X Tombs.
The ground directly above the X Tombs
was a site marked out for the burials
of a very important group of people.
That's the entrance to our tombs over there,
and the big structure behind me,
that's the Mausoleum of St. Helena,
Emperor Constantine's mum.
But ignore it entirely for the moment because it was built
in the early fourth century AD,
way after the time we're interested in.
During that time--
end first century to mid-third century AD--
despite what it now looks like, car park, football pitch,
this place was actually a really important cemetery
for the emperor's personal cavalry.
Now, the name changes over time but they're perhaps best known
as the Equites Singulares Augusti.
Equites Singulares Augusti
is Latin for "the Emperor's Chosen Horsemen,"
a regiment founded in the first century.
At the Museum of Roman Civilization,
we can get a close look at some spectacular reliefs
featuring the Equites as they fought under the command
of Emperor Trajan in the second century,
battling the Dacians from what is now Romania.
Here they are heading off with the Emperor Trajan into battle.
These guys really were the chosen ones
to share in the emperor's most successful military campaign.
The Equites were the finest imperial horsemen.
Most were foreigners, hand-picked as teenagers
from across the empire.
They were strong
and, by many accounts, very handsome warriors.
To be selected was a ticket to great wealth and high status.
This is one of my favorite scenes,
the Equites Singulares Augusti in full battle gear--
the helmets, the shields, the chain mail jackets,
on their horses, charging in behind their emperor, Trajan,
who offers the horseman's salute, the open right hand.
And they are coming to the rescue of the Roman troops
that are being besieged over here by the Dacians.
It really is the emperor,
his crack cavalry coming to the rescue.
The Equites' official graveyard has vanished,
but fragments of tombstones found in these catacombs suggest
that the Equites' cemetery was in use above ground
at the same time the bodies were being packed
into the X Tombs below.
Which raises an intriguing possibility.
It's unlikely that a space reserved for elites,
as the Equites were, would have been used for burials
of anyone completely unconnected with them.
(translated): It is possible
that these chambers might contain
dead Equites Singulares Augusti.
SCOTT: The people in the X Tombs were mostly young adults,
a mixture of men and women.
And we know from surviving tombstones
that the Equites were often buried
with their wives and slaves.
GIULIANI: When they were in Rome,
they lived here with their families.
This would explain the high number of female bodies
that were found in the tombs.
SCOTT: The Equites numbered 5,000 strong.
They were foreigners,
selected from various occupied territories
across Central Europe,
but also from southern Spain and North Africa.
This could explain the distinctive funeral rituals
similar to those in Tunisia and Algeria.
Written accounts also tell us the Equites would dress
in jackets embroidered with silver and gold thread.
The Equites were wealthy, well fed and well connected.
But if many of them died at once,
possibly from a raging plague or epidemic,
it's conceivable that the Equites community
may have converted pre-existing underground chambers--
possibly old water cisterns-- into a mass burial site.
It's only a theory, and we may never know for sure.
But from all the evidence we have,
it certainly seems plausible that the X Tombs could be
the last resting place for over 2,000 of these great horsemen
and their families--
soldiers especially chosen to protect the Roman emperor.
What I love about this investigation is the way
that it has been able to put not just the flesh back on the bones
but to turn these skeletons back into real people.
They came here to the caput mundi,
the capital of the world,
a kind of Ancient Roman version of the American dream.
The irony is that it was also here in Rome
that disease found its perfect breeding ground
and ultimately killed them.