Masada: Arms and the Man - The BAS Library

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Sometimes we make discoveries not by digging in the ground, but by digging in the records of past excavations. So it is with Masada, Herod’s nearly impregnable palace-fortress in the Judean wilderness, occupied and defended by Jewish Zealots during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. Masada was excavated in the 1960s by Israel’s most illustrious archaeologist, Yigael Yadin. It was a massive effort mobilizing hundreds of volunteers from all over the world. Yadin died in 1984, his final report still incomplete. Led by archaeologist Ehud Netzer, a team of scholars has taken up the task of analyzing the vast […]

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Footnotes

Ehud Netzer, “The Last Days and Hours at Masada,” BAR 17:06.

Quenching: rapid cooling of steel in water or some other liquid, which greatly increases the strength but induces brittleness.

Tempering: moderate reheating of quenched steel (to temperatures below 727° C.) to reduce the brittleness caused by quenching.

See Danny Syon, “Gamla: Portrait of a Rebellion,” BAR 18:01.

Endnotes

I am grateful to Dr. Ehud Netzer and Professor Gideon Foerster of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Joseph Aviram of the Israel Exploration Society, for their permission and encouragement to publish this article. My report on the arms and armor from Masada will appear in Masada, The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports, Vol 5, ed. J. Aviram, G. Foerster and E. Netzer (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, forthcoming). The ballista stones will be published in the same volume by Andrew E. Holley.

Josephus, The Jewish War 7.8.

Yigael Yadin, Masada (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 97: “The weapons of the Zealots, who used mainly bows and arrows were discovered by us in many locations on Masada. We found hundreds of arrows in such places as the middle terrace of the palace-villa, the western palace and elsewhere, literally in heaps where they had been piled and intentionally set on fire.” However, in his preliminary excavation report (“The Excavation of Masada 1963/64, Preliminary Report,” Israel Exploration Journal [IEJ] 15 [1965]), pp. 61–64, Yadin alludes to Zealot workshops in the western palace.

See Yadin, “Excavation of Masada,” where he incorrectly states that the arrowheads were found “in the eastern part of the mosaic” (p. 62).

The main reference for this section is R.F. Tylecote, “Furnaces, Crucibles, and Slags,” in The Coming of the Age of Iron, ed. T.A. Wertime and James D. Muhly (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 183–228.

See R. Knox et al., “Iron Objects from Masada: Metallurgical Studies,” IEJ 33 (1983), pp. 97–107.

The larger weapons, which would have been much more valuable, would have been taken by the Romans when they left Masada.