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Masada (Hebrew: מְצָדָה məṣādā, 'fortress'; Arabic: جبل مسعدة) [1] is an ancient fortification in southern Israel, situated on top of an isolated rock plateau, akin to a mesa. It is located on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert , overlooking the Dead Sea 20 km (12 miles) east of Arad .
The siege of Masada was one of the final events in the First Jewish–Roman War, occurring from 72 to 73 CE on and around a hilltop in present-day Israel. The siege is known to history via a single source, Flavius Josephus , [ 3 ] a Jewish rebel leader captured by the Romans , in whose service he became a historian.
They were written before 70 CE. 14 scroll manuscripts were discovered in Masada in 1963–1965. [7] The largest organized collection of Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts in the world is housed in the Russian National Library ("Second Firkovitch Collection") in Saint Petersburg. [4]
The Masada myth is the early Zionist retelling of the Siege of Masada, and an Israeli national myth. [1] The Masada myth is a selectively constructed narrative based on Josephus 's account, with the Sicarii depicted as heroes, instead of as brigands.
Site of Masada discovered. Karl Richard Lepsius begins an expedition to Egypt and the Sudan commissioned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Excavations
The Romans eventually took the fortress and, according to Josephus, found that most of its defenders had died by suicide rather than surrender. [6] In Josephus' The Jewish War (vii), after the fall of the Temple in AD 70, the sicarii became the dominant revolutionary Hebrew faction, scattered abroad.
Masada Remains of Roman camp F near Masada. Lucius Flavius Silva Nonius Bassus was a late-1st-century Roman general, governor of the province of Iudaea and consul. [1] Silva was the commander of the army, composed mainly of the Legio X Fretensis, in 72 AD that laid siege to the near-impregnable mountain fortress of Masada, occupied by a group of Jewish rebels dubbed the Sicarii by Flavius himself.
His father had bought three of the seven scrolls discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin goat-herd, and he had bought the other four in New York in 1954. [ 8 ] As an archeologist, he excavated some of the most important sites in the region, including the Qumran Caves , Masada , Hazor , Tel Megiddo and caves in the Judean Desert where artifacts from the ...