Masada's three hundred and seventy-five-foot (one hundred…

73 CE

Masada's three hundred and seventy-five-foot (one hundred and fourteen meters) high assault ramp consisted mostly of a natural spur of bedrock that required a ramp only thirty feet (9.1 meters) high built atop it in order to reach the Masada defenses.

According to Dan Gill (Gill, Dan. "A natural spur at Masada", Nature 364, pp. 569–570 [12 August 1993]), geological investigations in the early 1990s confirmed earlier observations to this effect.

This discovery diminishes both the scope of the construction and of the conflict between the Sicarii and Romans, relative to the popular perspective in which the ramp was an epic feat of construction.

The rampart is complete in the spring of 73, after probably two to three months of siege, allowing the Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress with a battering ram on April 16.

According to Josephus, when Roman troops entered the fortress, they discovered that its nine hundred and sixty inhabitants, led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir, had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed a mass suicide.

The account of the siege of Masada was supposedly related to Josephus by two women who survived the suicide by hiding inside a cistern along with five children, and repeated Eleazar ben Ya'ir's exhortations to his followers, prior to the mass suicide, verbatim to the Romans.

Because Judaism prohibits suicide, Josephus reported that the defenders had drawn lots and killed each other in turn, down to the last man, who would be the only one to actually take his own life.

Josephus says that Eleazar ordered his men to destroy everything except the foodstuffs to show that the defenders retained the ability to live, and so had chosen death over slavery.

Modern archaeologists have found no evidence of mass burial at the location and only some thirty skeletons have been recovered on the site.

The lack of such evidence and the absence of any first person historical references has led to the idea that a mass suicide is a myth.

In the area in front of the northern palace, eleven small ostraca were recovered by archaeologists, each bearing a single name.

One reads "ben Yair" and could be short for Eleazar ben Ya'ir.

It has been suggested that the other ten names are those of the men chosen by lot to kill the others and then themselves, as recounted by Josephus.

Archaeologist Yigael Yadin's excavations uncovered the skeletal remains of twenty-eight people at Masada.

The remains of a male twenty to twenty-two years of age, a female seventeen to eighteen, and a child approximately twelve years old, were found in the palace.

The remains of two men and a full head of hair with braids belonging to a woman were also found in the bath house.

Forensic analysis showed the hair had been cut from the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive (a Jewish practice for captured women) while the braids indicated she was married.

Based on the evidence, anthropologist Joe Zias, the Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1972 until his retirement in 1997, believed the remains may have been Romans whom the rebels captured when they seized the garrison.

The remains of twenty-five people were found in a cave at the base of the cliff.

Carbon dating of textiles found with the remains in the cave indicate they are contemporaneous with the period of the Revolt and it is believed that as they were buried with pig bones (a Roman practice), this indicates the remains may belong to Romans who garrisoned Masada after its recapture.

Others, nevertheless, still maintain that the remains are those of the Jewish Zealots who committed suicide during the siege of Masada, and all were reburied with full military honors on July 7, 1969 at Masada.