New Thoughts on the Roman Siege of Masada

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—According to a Haaretz report, a new study of the Roman structures at Masada conducted by Guy Stiebel of Tel Aviv University, Hai Ashkenazi of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and their colleagues suggests that the final siege at the hilltop desert fortress at the end of the First Jewish-Roman War (a.d. 66–73) lasted a couple of weeks, and not a couple of years, as had been previously thought. The first-century a.d. historian Josephus Flavius recorded that the fortress was captured from the Romans by a group of Jewish rebels known as the Sicarii in A.D. 66. A Roman legion surrounded Masada with a wall to isolate the Sicarii, and then constructed a siege ramp to enter the fortress around A.D. 73. The researchers estimated the original height, volume, and length of the well-preserved Roman structures through a ground survey, drone imagery, and 3-D digital modeling. They then used historical reports of how much stone a trained Roman soldier could carry in a day to estimate how long it would have taken to construct the siegeworks. The study indicates that if 5,000 of the 6,000 to 8,000 Roman soldiers at Masada were dedicated to building the wall, it would have taken them 11 to 16 days to complete the task. The ramp may have taken another four to six weeks, resulting in a “quick, brutal, and efficient affair,” lasting about two months, Stiebel said. “They came, they made a precision strike and they left after a few weeks,” he explained, adding that the Romans may have undertaken the operation because the Sicarii of Masada had attacked the Jewish town of Ein Gedi to the north and interrupted its lucrative trade in perfume. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Journal of Roman Archaeology. To read more about the First Jewish-Roman War, go to "Letter from Rome: Secrets of the Catacombs."