The First Jewish-Roman War began in 66 CE with a revolt against Roman taxation and religious oppression, and it ended badly for Judaea. By 70 CE, Titus had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, the spiritual center of Jewish life. Thousands were killed or enslaved. Organized resistance collapsed across the province -- except in a handful of remote fortresses. Masada was the last. The Sicarii, a radical faction within the broader Jewish revolt, had seized the mountaintop fortress from its Roman garrison in 66 CE, early in the war. While Jerusalem burned, they held their plateau above the Dead Sea. Their leader, Eleazar ben Ya'ir, had no army coming to relieve him, no diplomatic channel to negotiate through. He had stone walls, Herod's old storerooms, and a view that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

In 72 or 73 CE -- the exact year remains debated among scholars -- the Roman governor Lucius Flavius Silva arrived at Masada's base with the Tenth Legion (Fretensis), several auxiliary units, and thousands of Jewish prisoners forced into labor. Silva did not attempt to storm the cliffs. He surrounded the plateau with a circumvallation wall roughly 4,500 meters long, studded with eight military camps whose outlines are still visible from the air today. Then he began building a siege ramp against the western face, where a natural spur of bedrock reduced the vertical distance. The ramp took an estimated two to three months to complete, rising 114 meters to the fortress wall. Roman engineering at Masada was not improvisational; it was doctrine applied with relentless precision. When the ramp reached the top, a battering ram was hauled up and set to work. The defenders built an inner wall of earth and timber to absorb the blows, but the Romans set it on fire. By April of that year, the breach was open.

The only detailed account of what happened next comes from Flavius Josephus, who wrote The Jewish War roughly a decade after the siege. According to his narrative, Eleazar ben Ya'ir addressed his followers twice on the final night, arguing that death by their own hands was preferable to Roman slavery. The defenders agreed. Ten men were chosen by lot to carry out the killing; one was then chosen to kill the remaining nine and himself. Josephus reports 960 dead. Two women and five children survived by hiding in a water conduit beneath the fortress. When the Roman soldiers entered the next morning expecting combat, they found only silence and fire. Josephus's account is vivid and rhetorically polished -- suspiciously so, some scholars argue, noting that the speeches he attributes to Eleazar echo Greek philosophical arguments about the soul's liberation through death. Josephus was writing for a Roman audience and had his own complicated loyalties. He was not present at Masada.

Yigael Yadin's excavations from 1963 to 1965 confirmed much of the physical setting Josephus described: the casemate walls, the storerooms, the Roman camps, the ramp. But the evidence for a mass suicide proved far more ambiguous. Twenty-five skeletons found in a cave on the southern cliff were initially presented as defenders, but subsequent analysis raised questions -- some scholars have suggested they could be Roman soldiers or later burials. Pig bones at the site indicate Roman habitation after the siege. Three skeletons found on the lower terrace of the Northern Palace -- a man, woman, and child -- had their hair preserved in the dry desert air. Yadin identified them as defenders. Not all archaeologists agree. The physical evidence supports a Roman siege and breach. Whether 960 people died by collective decision or whether the end came in some other form, the ground does not conclusively say. What the ground does say is that someone lived on this plateau, and then the Romans came, and then it was over.

For nearly two millennia, the siege of Masada was a story known primarily through Josephus and largely ignored. That changed in the 1920s when Hebrew poet Yitzhak Lamdan wrote "Masada," a poem whose refrain -- "Masada shall not fall again" -- became a rallying cry for Jewish settlement in Palestine. After Israeli independence in 1948, the story was woven into the national fabric. Soldiers swore oaths on the summit. Schoolchildren made pilgrimages up the Snake Path. The archaeological excavations of the 1960s were treated as national events. In more recent decades, Israeli scholars have complicated this narrative. Nachman Ben-Yehuda's work on the "Masada myth" argued that the Zionist retelling selectively constructed its heroes: the Sicarii were not mainstream resistance fighters but a radical faction that Josephus accused of murdering fellow Jews and raiding nearby settlements. The debate continues, and it matters -- not because it changes what happened on the plateau, but because it illuminates how societies choose which stories to tell about themselves.