Masada, Israel

 

Introduction

Masada is an incredible place. not only because of its unique environment but also because of its history.

The first fort there was built by “Jonathan the High Priest,” thought to be Hasmonean King Alexander Janaeus (who ruled from 103 to 76 B.C.) justifying it name (Masada means “strong foundation or support”).

Although no definitive ruins have been discovered from that time, coins of that times were found at Masada so it can be assumed that the fortress was founded in 103-76 BC.

Judea was ruled autonomously by the Hasmonean kings from 140 until 63 BCE. The Hasmonean kings retained their titles, but became clients of Rome after the conquest by Pompey in 63 BCE.

Herod makes Masada his retreat

In 47 BC happened an event which, at the end, should have great impact for the future of Judea.

While Caesar was besieged in Alexandria, Antipater rescued him with three thousand men and the aid of numerous nearby friends. For his "demonstrations of valor" Caesar elevated Antipater to Roman citizenship, freed him from taxes, and showered him with honors and declarations of friendship.

Antipater was appointed as procurator and he appointed his sons to positions of influence: Phasael became Governor of Jerusalem, and Herod Governor of Galilee.

The tensions between the Herod family and the Hasmonean King (Antigonus II Mattathias) increased and 40 BC. Herod hid his family at Masada, when he went to Rome for the label to reign in Judea. The fortress withstood the siege of the last Hasmonean king Antigonus II due to large stocks of food and water.

On Herod's return from Rome in 39 BCE he opened a campaign against Antigonus and laid siege to Jerusalem. In the spring of 38 BCE, Herod wrested control of the province of Galilee and eventually all of Judea other than Jerusalem. In 37 BC Herod finally entered Jerusalem with the help of the Romans and Antigonus was taken to Antioch and crucified, ending Hasmonean rule.

Herod then became the ruler of the Judea as part of the Roman Empire.

Toward the end of the campaign against Antigonus, Herod had the granddaughter of Hyrcanus II, Mariamne who was also a niece of Antigonus. Herod did this in an attempt to secure his claim to the throne and gain some Jewish favor. However, Herod already had a wife, Doris, and a young son, Antipater, and chose therefore to banish them (the son would be executed 5 BC after plotting to kill Herod).

Herod was not popular among the Judea people and recognizing the defensive advantages of Masada, Herod built his complex there as a winter escape and haven from enemies, complete with castle, storerooms, cisterns and a foreboding wall.

Even though Masada today is breathtaking, it is difficult for the untrained eye to imagine how it must have been at that time.

All the plateau was surrounded by a 5.5 m high white stone casemated wall

The wall had 5 dozen interior rooms to accommodate the garrison. 

38 towers of 20-meter height towered above the wall. 
In the western part of the fortress was erected a vast palace with all the amenities, as well as with thick walls and watchtowers at the corners, 

In the north part of plateau another luxurious Palace-Villa, extensive administrative and warehouse complex, baths with hot sauna and a huge swimming pool.

The central part of the plateau was taken by gardens.

It was a spectacular place full of luxury and incredible views around, with the Dead sea to the East.

8 huge cisterns with a capacity of 40000 m3 were cut down at north-west side of the Masada mountain. During a short winter rains system of dams and aqueducts directed water from rivers to these cisterns and then water in jugs on donkeys was delivered to the top of Masada Mount store in the fortress. One days rain was enough to water the garison, including bath with sauna, swimming pool, fountains, gardens and everything else for long periods.

The details of how the sauna was built gives an idea of how luxurious it actually was.

200 short clay pillars beneath the floor created an open space beneath the floor. A furnace would pump hot air into the space beneath the floor where it would circulate and create heat. The heat rising from the floor produced a Turkish-bath effect, like a sauna. 

In addition, the walls were lined with hollow clay pipes which were pumped full of hot air. The walls and the floor was thereafter polished.

After Herod’s death (4 AC) and the annexation of Judea, the Romans built a garrison at Masada.

The Sicarii takes over Masada

Around year 60, Menahem, the leader of a group called the Sicarii ("dagger-man") formed an alliance with the Jerusalem priesthood, thus enabling the Sicarii to gain control of Masada by treachery.

With access to Herod’s armory, Menahem was able to recruit and arm a considerable number of troops. 

The Sicarii had never been part of the growing Jewish liberation movement and they didn’t share the nationalist goal of ridding Judaea of the occupiers. Sicarii was probably mostly to be seen as a group of outlaws and initially not organized neither religously nor politically.

In year 57 they had assassinated Jonathan, the high priest, probably on request from the procurator (Felix) as Jonathan had been reporting to Rome about Felix' corruption. Josephus recorded it as the first public murder committed by the Sicarii.

When Felix made no effort to apprehend the murderers, the Sicarii had entered Jerusalem and continued their outrages for private and mercenary reasons. The crimes and murders went on for days, and panic spread throughout the city. When the Sicarii finally left Jerusalem, they retired to their old haunts in the countryside and continued their campaign of brigandage. 

To protect themselves, the wealthy and powerful recruited their own gangs of thugs, whom they employed in the increasingly violent conflicts between those who wanted to drive the Romans from Judaea and those who wanted to make an accommodation with the occupiers. The country teetered on the brink of civil war, as various Jewish groups fought one another more than the Romans.

In 66 a minor altercation in Caesarea between Jews and Greeks over the use of an old synagogue flared into sectarian violence. When the Roman garrison failed to intervene, tensions escalated. In protest a clerk in the Temple in Jerusalem suspended the daily prayers and sacrifices for the health of the Roman emperor, at which point procurator Gessius Florus sent troops into the city to confiscate 17 talents of gold from the Temple treasury. When the unrest spread throughout Jerusalem, Florus arrested a number of city leaders and citizens and had them publicly whipped and crucified. Outraged, various Jewish groups converged on the Holy City, overran the small Roman garrison and occupied the capital. Shortly thereafter Jewish militias and rebel groups began attacking Roman citizens and pro-Roman Jewish officials throughout the country. 

The "Great revolt" of the jews has broken out.

When the Sicarii returned to Jerusalem during the "Great revolt", they spent most of their time fighting other criminal groups and terrorizing the population with robberies and murders. 

The Sicarii’s primary goal was to appoint their leader, Menahem, as high priest. To achieve this, they killed Ananias, the current high priest.

Menahem did not have long to enjoy his new position, however. Eleazar ben Ananias, son of the murdered high priest Jonathan and now leader of the Temple faction, had the Sicarii leader assassinated. This provoked a violent struggle between ben Ananias’ faction and the Sicarii, ending with the Sicarii fleeing Jerusalem and taking refuge in Masada under the leadership of Eleazar ben Ya’ir, whom Josephus describes as “a relative” of Menahem.

Thus, by late 66 or early 67 the Sicarii had already been driven from Jerusalem, not by the Romans but by other Jews, their leader had been killed, and they had taken up residence in Masada, where they sat out the rest of the revolt against Rome. The Sicarii occupying Herod’s fortress supported themselves as they had always done, by raiding and robbing. “They plundered all the villages around the fortress,” Josephus says, “and laid waste the entire area while many from every side were daily corrupted along with them.”

The siege

The emperor Nero had assigned Vespasian and his son Titus to put down the rebellion.

In early 70 Titus and his legions laid siege to Jerusalem. The Romans first encircled the city with a deep trench, and then used its earthen walls as a place to crucify anyone caught trying to escape. According to one source, on some days the Romans executed 500 people in this manner. That summer, after a seven-month siege, Titus’ legions breached Jerusalem’s defenses, slaughtered its population, pulled down its walls and burned down the Temple, the flames quickly spreading to the rest of the city. Sporadic resistance continued in the countryside but was soon overcome. 

In the spring of 71 Titus sailed for Rome, directing Lucilius Bassus to sweep up any remaining rebels. Bassus died, however and command passed to Lucius Flavius Silva. In late autumn 72, Legion X Fretensis, supported by auxiliary troops and employing thousands of Jewish slave laborers, laid siege to Masada.

Lucius Flavius Silva, led Roman legion X Fretensis, a number of auxiliary units and Jewish prisoners of war, totaling some 15,000 men and women to lay siege to the 960 people in Masada. 

The Roman legion surrounded Masada and built a circumvallation wall. The remains of the Camps and the circumvallation wall are still visible around Masada.

Thereafter they commenced the construction of a siege ramp against the western face of the plateau, moving thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth to do so.

The ramp was completed in the spring of 73, after probably two to three months of siege. A giant siege tower with a battering ram was constructed and moved laboriously up the completed ramp, while the Romans assaulted the wall, discharging "a volley of blazing torches against ... a wall of timber", allowing the Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress on April 16, 73 CE.

Josephus does not record any attempts by the Sicarii to counterattack the besiegers during this process, a significant difference from his accounts of other sieges of the revolt.

The ramp is still virtually inpact and one of the characteristics of Masada that makes the history live. Seeing this ramp and knowing how it was built by hand and, at the end, used by the Romans to reach the plateau makes it easy to travel 2000 years back in the history. 

When the Romans entered the fortress, however, they found it to be "a citadel of death." The Jewish rebels had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and had killed each other, declaring "a glorious death ... preferable to a life of infamy."

The story of the resistance, the last remains of the liberation movement, that rather died by own hand than being captured by the Romans is now part of the Israel folklore. The group of killers and thugs that was driven out from Jerusalem after infights with other Jewish groups are now described as the last remains of a religous liberation movement. In my mind, the real history is as interesting and intriguing as the myth. 

Prologue

For several centuries, Masada remained uninhabited. During the Byzantine period, in the fifth century A.D., a group of monks known as the Iaura took of the Masada and built a hermetic monastery.

Two centuries later, as Islam took hold of the region, the site was again abandoned.

For nearly 13 centuries, the area remained uninhabited until, in 1828, scholars rediscovered Masada. In the following years, researchers climbed the mountain and mapped it.

In 1953, the Israeli archeologist Shmariya Gutman excavated Masada; other researchers continued to excavate the site in the 1950s and 1960s.

Further excavations in the 1980s and 1990s uncovered more structures.

Our visit

We visited Masada in Octobre 2016, starting the ascent at 6am, still in dark, with the intention to see the sunrise from the plateau.

The ascent was a good exercise and helped to understand how impossible it would be to attack any defenders up on the plateau.

Once on the plateau we were amazed by the history, realizing how luxurious the place had been, seeing so clearly where the Romans had held their camps and, of course, the ramp.

It was very easy to imagine how the inhabitants (being a bunch of killer or not) had felt when they saw themselves trapped by Romans in all directions and to see how the ramp was built, coming closer every day, and knowing that the end was inevitable.

A really nice visit which I still hold dear in my memory.

Album

https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/03/27/siege-of-masada-the-last-stand-against-the-roman-empire/

https://www.historynet.com/the-myth-of-masada.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicarii