Herod's Masada Fortress

By N.S. Gill, About.com Guide

The Roman castra was a fortified military camp for the Roman legions that developed the type of walls and towers so emblematic of the medieval castle, but the medieval castle was more personal than the housing of a country's army. This use, too, was in evidence in the ancient Roman Empire, at Masada, a word that the Jewish Virtual Library says means "fortress". There Herod the Great purposefully (re-)built a defensive structure by c. 30 B.C. for himself, with a palace inside a fortress.

Chancey and Porter ("The Archaeology of Roman Palestine") think the building took place in three stages, with the initial task, the building of the western royal palace and storerooms, with the apartments and throne room around an open courtyard. He also built three similar, but smaller palaces to the south and east, and columbaria, swimming pool, and barracks. Later, he built the most impressive structure at Masada, the ceremonial northern palace. At this time he also added utilitarian wings to the western palace.

Masada topped a high plateau 600 x 300 m, difficult of access, and almost 2100 feet above the Dead Sea while in the middle of a desert. It was hot and dry. Thick dolomite walls covered with plaster moderated the interior temperature. Herod built a hall for a synagogue oriented to face Jerusalem into a wall. Herod stored provisions (including grain, wine, oil, pulse and dates, for food; weapons, iron, brass, and tin, for making implements) and water supplies, cloisters, and baths. There are said to have been 38 towers along the wall reaching as high as 90 feet. Barracks, storehouses, palaces and an armory were also on the inside of protective exterior walls.

Masada is more familiar from about a century later, as the final stronghold of the Jewish resistance in the first century A.D. war with Rome. Jewish rebels who preferred suicide to conquest made it the site of their last stand. The Romans attacked the fortress, in 73/74 A.D. [see Roman Occupation Timeline], but only won after they built a substantial ramp and then dragged a siege engine up it. With this, they broke through the wall. Most of the Jews inside, having committed a kind of suicide pact (some of the men were chosen to do the mas killing and then kill themselves), were dead.

Sources:

• _{"The Archaeology of Roman Palestine," by Mark Alan Chancey and Adam Lowry Porter; Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 164-203.}
• _{Records of the Past Exploration Society, 1906.}
• _{Castles: Their Construction and History, by Sidney Toy; (1985).}
• _{The Jewish Virtual Library}