Masada Shall Never Fail (to Surprise) Again

Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 2018

Masada—the remote mountain-plateau in the Judean Desert, where Herod built a palace-fortress and where Jewish Zealots made their last stand against the Romans—is being excavated once again. Get an inside look at some of the expedition’s preliminary findings, as excavations shed new light on the dramatic site.

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.
See Gwyn Davies, “The Masada Siege—From the Roman Viewpoint,” BAR, July/August 2014.

2.
See Sidnie White Crawford, “Scribe Links Qumran and Masada,” BAR, November/December 2012.

Endnotes

1.
The 2017/2018 staff comprised Guy Stiebel (Expedition Director); Boaz Gross (Field Director); Alexandra Wrathall (Area Supervisor and Administrator); Omer Ze’evi, Na’ama Walzer, Ayala Zilberstein, and Hai Ashkenazi (Area Supervisors); Joshua Errington (Surveyor); Yana Krilov-Levinger and Yuval Hai (Field Assistants); Shira Ben-Shahar and Chen Antler (Registrars and Field Assistants); Talya Ksenia (Assistant to Field Administrator); Sasha Flit (Photographer); and Orna Cohen (Conservation).

2. Classical archaeologist Gideon Foerster pointed out the architectural similarities between the layout of the upper terrace of the hanging Northern Palace at Masada and that of the Roman villa under Villa Farnesina, the suburban Renaissance home lying in the Via della Lungara in the Trastevere district in Rome, which has been suggested to be the residence of Marcus Agrippa, Herod’s benefactor.

3.
Our recent research regarding Herod the Great’s water usage resulted in our receiving the Third Shanghai Archaeological Forum (SAF) Discovery Award in 2017.

4.
This new understanding moves away from the “Sons of Light vs. Sons of Darkness” narrative that has typified the last 50 years of research following Yadin’s work and the subsequent criticism that followed in the past two decades. Both approaches appear to have missed multiple indicators of a far more heterogeneous group of rebels.