Siege of Masada - The Roman Siege

The Roman Siege

In 72, the Roman governor of Iudaea, Lucius Flavius Silva, led Roman legion X Fretensis to lay siege to the 960 people in Masada. The Roman legion surrounded Masada and built a circumvallation wall and then a siege embankment against the western face of the plateau, moving thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth to do so.

Josephus does not record any attempts by the Sicarii to counterattack the besiegers during this process, a significant difference from his accounts of other sieges of Jewish fortresses. He did record their earlier raid on Ein-Gedi, a nearby Jewish settlement, where the Sicarii allegedly killed 700 of its inhabitants.

According to Dan Gill, geological investigations in the early 1990s confirmed earlier observations that the 375-foot (114 m) high assault ramp consisted mostly of a natural spur of bedrock that only required a ramp 30 feet (9.1 m) built atop it in order to reach Masada's defenses. This discovery would diminish both the scope of the construction and of the conflict between the Sicarii and Romans, relative to the popular perspective in which the ramp was an epic feat of construction.

The rampart was complete in the spring of 73, after probably two to three months of siege, allowing the Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress with a battering ram on April 16. According to Josephus, however, when the Romans entered the fortress they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and had committed mass suicide. Modern archaeologists have found no evidence of mass suicide and only some thirty skeletons have been recovered from the site.