After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 70 CE, almost a thousand Jews – men, women and children – made a desperate last stand atop Masada, a desert mesa surrounded by sheer cliffs and, from 72 CE, the might of the Roman Empire’s Tenth Legion. As a Roman battering ram was about to breach their walls, Masada’s defenders chose suicide over enslavement. When Roman soldiers swarmed onto the top of the flat-topped mountain, they were met with silence.
Until archaeological excavations began in 1963, the only source of information about Masada’s heroic resistance and bloody end was Josephus Flavius, a Jewish commander during the Great Jewish Revolt (66 to 70 CE) who, after being captured, reinvented himself as a Roman historian. He writes that as the Roman siege ramp inched towards the summit, the defenders – Zealots known as Sicarii (Sikrikin in Hebrew) because of their habit of assassinating their (Jewish) rivals using a curved dagger (sica in Greek) hidden under their cloaks – began to set fire to their homes and possessions to prevent them falling into Roman hands. Ten men, who would have the task of killing everyone else, were then chosen by lot. Nine of the 10 were executed by one of their number before the last man alive committed suicide. When the Romans broke through everyone was dead – except for two women and five children, who had survived by hiding.
Over the last century, Masada has become Israeli shorthand for the attitude that ‘they’ll never take us alive’. During WWII, before the British stopped Rommel’s German divisions at El Alamein (Egypt) in 1942, some Palestinian Jews made plans for a last stand atop Mt Carmel, and a number of Israeli army units hold their swearing-in ceremonies here, vowing that ‘Masada shall not fall again’. (Less apocalyptically, the Israeli air force has been known to send groups of officers up top do yoga at sunrise.)
Masada has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2001. The entire site, except the Northern Palace, is wheelchair accessible.
