Masada

Masada is a fortress on an isolated, flat-topped rock in the Judaean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea's western shore in south-eastern Israel. Its most important remains, including two palaces, storerooms and an elaborate water system, were built by Herod the Great in the first century BCE. Masada is best known as the last stronghold of Jewish rebels in the war against Rome that ended in 73 or 74 CE. Nearly everything known of its ancient history comes from a single writer, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, and archaeologists have found that his account does not always match the evidence.

Long before the fortress, people used caves in the cliffs: barley seeds about 6,000 years old from a cave on the southern face have been genetically sequenced. According to Josephus, the summit was first fortified by the Hasmonean ruler Alexander Jannaeus, though excavators have found no Hasmonean buildings, only many of his coins. Josephus also relates that Herod seized Masada in the power struggles after 43 BCE and that it held out against a siege by the last Hasmonean king, Antigonus II Mattathias. Between about 37 and 31 BCE, again according to Josephus, Herod turned the plateau into a refuge in case of revolt. He surrounded the summit with towers and a casemate wall, and built storehouses, barracks, Roman-style baths, cisterns fed by channels from the nearby gullies, and two palaces, one of them stepped down three terraces of the northern cliff.

At the start of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 CE, a rebel faction known as the Sicarii took Masada from its Roman garrison by a ruse. Josephus describes them as extremists at odds with the larger Zealot movement and says they raided nearby Jewish villages, killing 700 women and children at Ein Gedi. After the fall of Jerusalem, Masada was among the last places still held by the rebels.

The Roman governor Lucius Flavius Silva brought the Tenth Legion, Fretensis, together with auxiliaries and Jewish prisoners, against the fortress; the sources date the siege to 73 or 74. The Romans surrounded the rock with a wall and camps and raised a great ramp against the western side, which geological studies in the 1990s showed was largely a natural spur of bedrock. Once a siege tower and ram had breached the wall, Josephus says, the Romans found that the defenders, led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir, had burned the buildings except the food stores and killed themselves and one another, 960 people in all, with only two women and five children surviving.

The mass suicide is the most contested part of the story. Excavators have found the remains of at most 28 people, not 960. Bones from 24 or 25 individuals in a cave below the southern wall were reburied as Jewish defenders in a state ceremony in 1969, but pig bones found with them have led some researchers, including the anthropologist Joe Zias, to suggest they may be Roman soldiers or civilians. The historian Shaye Cohen judged Josephus's description of the site "incomplete and inaccurate", and some scholars reject the suicide story altogether, while others point out that parts of his description, such as the baths and coloured stone floors, have proved correct. Among the finds are eleven small potsherds each bearing a name, one reading "ben Ya'ir", which some link to the lots Josephus says the last defenders drew.

In the fifth and sixth centuries a small monastery of the Byzantine period, generally identified with the Marda known from saints' lives, occupied the summit. Edward Robinson and Eli Smith identified the site in 1838, and the first modern ascent was made in 1842. After an initial probe in 1959, the archaeologist Yigael Yadin led large excavations from 1963 to 1965, uncovering the palaces, a synagogue, scroll fragments of biblical books and a date seed later germinated into a living palm.

In the twentieth century Masada became a powerful symbol of Jewish resistance in Zionist and Israeli national identity, and armoured corps recruits were sworn in on the summit with the words "Masada shall not fall again." Scholars such as Klara Palotai have studied how this heroic narrative was constructed. UNESCO listed Masada as a World Heritage Site in 2001, chiefly because the Roman siege works around it are the best preserved of their kind. It lies within Masada National Park.