Masada is a flat-topped rock above the Dead Sea with a 400 meter drop on its east side and a 90 meter cliff on the west. Between 37 and 31 BC, Herod the Great, fearful of his own subjects and of Cleopatra, ringed it with a 1,300 meter casemate wall and built two palaces, including the Northern Palace that steps down three cliff terraces. Cisterns cut into the rock held about 40,000 cubic meters of floodwater. In 66 AD the Sicarii, a radical faction Josephus says raided Ein Gedi and killed 700 women and children, took the fortress. In 73 or 74 AD Lucius Flavius Silva arrived with the Tenth Legion and some 15,000 people, walled the base, and built a 114 meter siege ramp up a bedrock spur.

The Romans breached the wall on April 16. Josephus wrote that Eleazar ben Yair persuaded the defenders to die rather than be enslaved, that men chosen by lot killed the rest, and that 960 people died, with two women and five children surviving. Yigael Yadin’s 1960s excavation found scroll fragments and 11 inscribed pottery shards, one reading ben Yair, but also two palaces, several separate fires, and the remains of only 28 or 29 people. Some scholars think Josephus, who survived a rigged suicide lottery himself at Yodfat, borrowed that story. In the 20th century Masada became a national symbol, with Armored Corps recruits swearing that Masada shall not fall again.

• The Methuselah date palm, grown from a roughly 2,000-year-old seed found at Masada
• Pig bones found with 25 skeletons in a cave, pointing to Roman ritual rather than Jewish rebels
• A woman’s braids shaved off while she was alive, consistent with ancient rules for captive brides
• The 1942 British Masada Plan for a last stand on Mount Carmel if Rommel advanced
• 6,000-year-old barley seeds from the nearly inaccessible Yoram Cave in the cliff face