Endnote 1 – It’s a Natural: Masada Ramp Was Not a Roman Engineering Miracle

The idea that the entire spur was built by the Romans is either explicitly stated or implied in numerous publications. See, for example, Christopher Hawkes, “The Roman siege of Masada,” Antiquity 3 (1929), pp. 195–213; Michael Avi-Yonah, Nachman Avigad, Yochanan Aharoni, Imanuel Dunayevsky and Shmaria Gutman, “The archaeological survey of Masada, 1955–1956,” Israel Exploration Journal 7:1 (1957), pp. 1–60, esp. p. 7; Yigael Yadin, Masada, Herod’s fortress and the Zealots’ last stand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 226; Avi-Yonah, Carta’s atlas of the period of the Second Temple, the Mishnah and the Talmud, 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Carta, 1974; in Hebrew); Y.L. Levin, The History of Eretz Ysrael, vol. 4, The Roman and Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Ketter and Yad Ben-Zvi, 1984; in Hebrew); Israel Shatzman, “The Roman Siege of Masada,” in Gila Hurvitz, ed., The Story of Masada: Discoveries From the Excavations (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1997), pp. 109–130. It is particularly significant that this understanding is evidently still prevalent among archaeologists such as Meir Ben-Dov and Ehud Netzer. See Ben-Dov, “In contradiction to the claim made by geologist Dan Gill, archaeologists claim the Masada siege ramp is man-made,” Ha’aretz (August 13, 1993), p. 6 (in Hebrew); and Netzer, “Masada ramp thesis is as firm as bedrock,” Jerusalem Post (December 7, 1994), p. 7.