It is the spring of 73 AD and the revolt that has raged in the Roman province of Judea for eight years is about to reach its bloody and tragic conclusion. On an isolated rock overlooking the Dead Sea at the edge of the Judean Desert 967 men, women and children - the last remnants of Jewish resistance to Imperial Rome - await their fate. The spectacular natural redoubt that has become their final refuge is called Masada, from the Hebrew mezuda meaning "fortress" or "stronghold."

For two years the inhabitants of Masada have waged a successful guerrilla war against the Romans, but now the Roman governor of Judea, Flavius Silva, has arrived with his army. After moving thousands of tons of earth and stone to construct a rampart 375 feet high abutting the western approach to Masada he begins to batter the stronghold's walls with ballistae and catapult fire. Rather than allow themselves and their families to fall into enemy hands the brave but doomed defenders of Masada choose to commit mass suicide. When the Roman army finally breaks into the stronghold they find only an eerie silence and the bodies of the dead.

This is the version of the Masada story generally accepted today. However at least one Israeli academic, Nachman Ben-Yehuda, 1 suggests that the truth may be somewhat less romantic and heroic.

"When we carefully examine ....... the Great Revolt and Masada, a portrait of heroism ...... is simply not provided. On the contrary. The narrative conveys the story of a doomed (and questionable) revolt, of a majestic failure and destruction of the Second Temple and of Jerusalem, of large-scale massacres of the Jews, of different factions of Jews fighting and killing each other, of collective suicide (an act not viewed favourably by the Jewish faith) by a group of terrorists and assassins whose "fighting spirit" may have been questionable." 2

Understandably views such as these have raised the hackles of many Jewish historians. But is Ben-Yehuda's interpretation of events correct? How much of the Masada story is history and how much is myth?

There are two major sources we can refer to in order to analyse this question. The first is the only contemporary account of the siege written by the Jewish historian Josephus. The second is the archaeological evidence that was unearthed by the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin during his major excavation of the site between 1963 and 1965.

Both sources agree on the basic storyline. Jewish rebels seized the fortress around 66 BC (by treachery, according to Jospehus 3), and killed the Roman garrison. Josephus tells us that another group of rebels under the leadership of Eleazar ben Yair fled to Masada after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Yadin's excavations support this period of occupation by way of numerous small finds including scrolls, pottery, weapons, clothes and Jewish coins dating up to the year of the siege. 4

The fact that there was a siege is also beyond doubt - the remains of the Roman circumvallation and siege camp, along with the great ramp Silva had constructed abutting the western approach to Masada, are still visible.

From this point, however, the "facts" are open to interpretation. Were the defenders of Masada a group of religious zealots who fought a heroic but doomed guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly superior adversary? Certainly Josephus's account does not reflect this view. In fact he shows nothing but contempt for the defenders of the fortress, whom he describes as Sicarii - an extremist group that committed murder in order to obtain their political objectives. They took their name from the "sicae" or small daggers concealed under their cloaks with which they stabbed their opponents - almost exclusively fellow Jews who they perceived as too moderate or openly sympathetic to Roman rule. 5 These Sicarii, Josephus states, "strove with one another in their single capacity, and in their communities, who should run the greatest lengths in impiety towards God and in unjust actions towards their neighbors".

Nowhere in his account of the Masada siege does Josephus make any reference to the defenders taking the initiative against the Roman army, even though many contemporary versions credit them with waging a guerilla war against the Romans for up to three years. This omission cannot be attributed to pro-Roman bias on Josephus's part - he includes stories of Jewish attacks against the Romans at both Jerusalem and Machaerus in other parts of his narrative. The most likely reason that there is no mention of attacks being launched against the Romans at Masada is because the defenders never launched any. In fact the only military action of any size that he attributes to them is a raid on the nearby Jewish settlement of Ein-Gedi during which they slaughtered more than 700 of their co-religionists, many of them woman and children. 6

Regarding the conduct of the siege, Josephus tells us that Silva set his army to work moving thousands of tons of earth and stone to construct a rampart 375 high abutting the western approach to Masada. Excavations at the site, however, indicate that Josephus may be mistaken or deliberately misleading on this point as there is an extant spur of rock that the Roman's used as a foundation for their construction. This meant they only had to add 25 to 30 feet to this natural feature in order to raise the ramp to the level of the fortress' walls. The time required to complete this engineering feat would have been significantly less than building it from the ground up, which would have a resulting impact on the length of the siege itself. Rather than being a long and heroic resistance, the whole episode may have been over in as little a month.

Josephus is quite specific about how the defenders of Masada met their end. When the Romans had completed their siege works and defeat was inevitable they chose to kill themselves rather than fall into captivity. Each man first executed his own wife and children, then ten men were chosen by lot to kill the survivors. These remaining ten then drew lots to establish which among them would kill the other nine.

Yadin's excavations uncovered a cluster of eleven small ostraca in front of the palace. Each of these was inscribed with a single name; including one that reads "Ben Yair". Yadin believed these to be the lots used by the last survivors to decide which of their number would kill the others before ending his own life. However if this is the case it begs the question; why are there eleven names inscribed instead of the ten specified by Jospehus?

Having dispatched his compatriots the sole survivor is stated to have set fire to the fortress - with the exception of the well supplied store houses that, according to Josephus, were left intact to show the Romans that the defenders had not been "subdued for want of necessaries". 7 This appears to contradict the archaeological evidence. When the storerooms were excavated the original floor was covered with a thick layer of ash indicating that they were also put to the torch.

Josephus was specific about the number of people besieged at Masada - 967 men, women and children. He also states that with the exception of two women and five children who hid themselves in the caverns beneath the citadel that they all perished. He is equally specific about where they died; the royal palace. Yadin's excavations uncovered the remains of only 28 people, however, and of these only three were discovered under the debris of the palace. The remainder were discovered in a cave at the base of the cliff.

Yadin proposed that the remains were those of Masada's defenders, and went so far as to state that the three skeletons found in the palace "undoubtedly represent the remains of an important commander of Masada and his family". He even went so far as to suggest that the man might have been the last warrior who, having killed his comrades, committed suicide next to the bodies of his wife and child. 8 This interpretation appears to have been based solely on the fact that some armour was found near the remains. The theory was further weakened by one of Yadin's own team, an anthropologist, who estimated the man's age as between 20 and 22, the woman's between 17 and 18, and the child's about 11 or 12 years old at the time of death. If these estimations are correct the grouping could not possibly constitute a nuclear family. 9 The whereabouts of the remaining 932 bodies remains a mystery.

Josephus makes no mention of the 25 bodies in the cave so their origin is open to conjecture. Were they, as Shaye Cohen 10 believes, the "remains of Jews who attempted to hide from the Romans but were discovered and killed" (which contradicts the popularly held belief that the entire population of Masada willingly committed mass suicide), or are they the bodies of Christians who inhabited Masada during Byzantine times as some scholars have suggested?

Joseph Zias of Jerusalem's Rockefeller Museum has yet another theory. After carbon dating samples of textiles found with the remains indicated that they appeared to be contemporaneous with the period of the Revolt, he postulated that they could in fact be of Roman origin. Yadin admitted in 1982 that he had found pig bones alongside the remains - a highly unlikely combination if they were indeed those of zealous Jews to whom the pig is an unclean animal. But Zias notes that Romans sacrificed pigs at burials. Fourteen of the skeletons were adult males, 6 of whom were described as between 35-50, powerfully built and of a "distinctively different physical type from the rest". 12 Could these be the remains of members of the Legion Tenth Fretensis who conducted the siege of Masada and occupied it after its recapture? 11 As one of the emblems of this legion was the boar this would be a quite reasonable interpretation.

A government committee overruled Yadin's suggestion that all these remains be interred in the cave where they were found. Instead they were buried at Masada with full military honours on July 7, 1969.

There are many apparent anomalies in the Masada story, and many of these can be traced to Yigael Yadin and his interpretation of the archaeological remains. Although a revered figure in Israel, he has been accused of interpreting his finds to fit with the heroic mythos of Masada. As to his motives for doing this, Ben-Yehuda suggests "nationalistic, ideological motivation played a very major part in the decision to excavate Masada". 12 He also argues that a nation needs myths to help it "shape a central process of nation and state-building....to shape identities and create cohesion by fostering a strong sense of a shared past". 13 This is particularly true of Israel at the time of Yadin's dig. Less than two decades old and surrounded on all sides by enemies dedicated to her destruction, Israel needed "a new type of Jew, somebody that was willing to fight and die for his own country". 14 Yadin interpreted the events at Masada in a way that provided the requisite role model.

Wherever the truth lies, the Masada story still resonates strongly today both as an enduring symbol of the Jewish state's struggle for existence and of human courage in the face of insurmountable opposition. In December 2001 UNESCO's World Heritage Committee inscribed the Masada site on the World Heritage List stating that it was:

"...a symbol of the ancient Jewish Kingdom of Israel, of its violent destruction in the later 1st century CE, and of the subsequent Diaspora.


"The tragic events during the last days of the Jewish refugees who occupied the fortress and palace of Masada make it a symbol both of Jewish cultural identity and, more universally, of the continuing human struggle between oppression and liberty."
Bibliography

The Jewish war - Flavius Josephus

Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Masada Myth - Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Prometheus Books, 2002

Apocalypse - The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome, Neil Faulkner, Tempus Publishing, UK, 2002

Masada : Cave 2001/2002 - Dr James D Tabor

Flavius Josephus Eyewitness to Rome's First-Century Conquest of Judea - Mireille Hadas-Lebel

Masada - The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website

Masada ; Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains and the Credibility of Jospehus - Shaye Cohen

Masada Martyrs - Haim Watzman, Archaeological Institute of America - Volume 50 Number 6, November/December 1997

Israeli Icon Under Fire, Chronicle of Higher Education Dec 6, 2002 - Richard Monastersky

UNESCO World Heritage Committee Meeting Minutes, Dec 2001

1 Dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of "The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel"

2 The Masada Myth - Nachman Ben-Yehuda

3 The Wars of the Jews, Book II, Chapter 17 - Josephus

4 Israeli Icon Under Fire - Richard Monastersky

5 Jewish Encyclopedia - entry by Richard Gottheil and Samuel Kraus

6 Jewish War 4:401-4 - Jospehus

7 Josephus

8 Israeli Icon Under Fire, Richard Monastersky

9 Israeli Icon Under Fire, Richard Monastersky

10 Masada; Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains and the Credibility of Josephus

12 Masada Cave 2001/2002 - James D Tabor

11 Masada Martyrs - Haim Watzman, Archaeological Institute of America

12 Interview of Nachman Ben-Yehuda moderated by Richard Monastersky, Chronicle of Higher Education

13 Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Masada Myth - Nachman Ben-Yehuda

14 Israeli Icon Under Fire, Richard Monastersky

But in the latest salvo in this battle, the president of the European Association of Archaeologists said on Friday that he had visited the 700-foot (213-meter) hill and saw no evidence that it was human-made.

Speaking at a press conference in Sarajevo, Anthony Harding told reporters the pyramid-shaped hill was a natural phenomenon.

"My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues is what we saw was entirely geological in nature," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.

"Further work of the same kind would simply produce the same results. I don't think it would change any view about what the nature of the hill is," he said.

Harding, an archaeology professor at England's University of Exeter, visited Visoko, 18 miles (30 kilometers) from Sarajevo, on Thursday.

European Pyramid?

In April 2006 the Houston-based Osmanagic and a mostly volunteer crew began limited excavations in the area and drilled exploratory wells.

The team uncovered what they describe as large stone blocks shaped by human hands and a network of tunnels fronted by a wide, paved entranceway.

Osmanagic has speculated that Illyrians-ancient ancestors of today's Albanians-could have built the alleged pyramid perhaps as early as 12,000 years ago during the last ice age.

Last month Osmanagic told National Geographic News that he was "100 percent convinced" that the pyramid was real.

Those claims have drawn near unanimous contempt from professional archaeologists.

Harding, an expert on Bronze Age Europe, has dismissed Osmanagic's theories as "wacky" and "absurd."

Balkan prehistory expert Curtis Runnels, an archaeologist at Boston University and editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology, joins the chorus of skeptics.

"Mr. Osmangic offers no concrete physical evidence to support his claims, despite the fact that they are fantastic," he said.

"[T]he area was in fact occupied by Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with a Stone Age technology sufficient for building fires, tents, and simple hunting implements like bows and arrows."

"They were not pyramid builders."

Recent Twist

In another recent twist, wire reports quoted Aly Abd Alla Barakat, a geologist with the Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority.

Barakat, who visited the hill at the behest of Osmanagic's team, told the Associated Press late last week, "My opinion is that this is a type of pyramid, probably a primitive pyramid."

To the AFP, he said: "The white stuff I found between the blocks could be a glue. It is very similar to that we have found in the Giza pyramids."

Critics remain unswayed, and some have questioned Barakat's expertise.

Of the alleged Bosnian pyramid, the European Association of Archaeology's Harding said, "You'd be surprised how many natural stone formations can look as if they are man-made."

Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat - of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bible as history.

Chronology is at the crux of the debate. Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history?

An international team of archaeologists has recorded radiocarbon dates that they say show the tribes of Edom may have indeed come together in a cohesive society as early as the 12th century B.C., certainly by the 10th. The evidence was found in the ruins of a large copper-processing center and fortress at Khirbat en-Nahas, in the lowlands of what was Edom and is now part of Jordan.

Thomas E. Levy, a leader of the excavations, said in an interview last week that the findings there and at abandoned mines elsewhere in the region demonstrated that the Edomites had developed a complex state much earlier than previously thought.

Dr. Levy, an archaeologist at the University of California, San Diego, said the research had yielded not only the first high-precision dates in the region, but also such telling artifacts as scarabs, ceramics, metal arrowheads, hammers, grinding stones and slag heaps. Radiocarbon analysis of charred wood, grain and fruit in several sediment layers revealed two major phases of copper processing, first in the 12th and 11th centuries, later in the 10th and 9th.

Khirbat en-Nahas is 30 miles from the Dead Sea and 30 miles north of Petra, Jordan's most famous archaeological site. The name means "ruins of copper" in Arabic. One of the first ancient occupation sites in the Edomite lowlands to be intensively investigated, the ruins of its buildings and grounds spread over 24 acres, and the fortifications enclose an area 240 by 240 feet.

"Only a complex society such as a paramount chiefdom or primitive kingdom would have the organizational know-how to produce copper metal on such an industrial scale," Dr. Levy concluded.

The first results of the research by Dr. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, director of excavations and surveys at the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, were described two years ago at a conference at the University of Oxford, England, and in a report in the British journal Antiquity. Reverberations of support and criticism have shaken the field of biblical archaeology ever since.

With the addition of new dates and more evidence of the importance of copper in the emergence of Edom, the two archaeologists have amplified their interpretations in an article being published this month in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review.

"We have discovered a degree of social complexity in the land of Edom," they wrote, "that demonstrates the weak reed on the basis of which a number of scholars have scoffed at the idea of a state or complex chiefdom in Edom at this early period."

The findings, Dr. Levy and Dr. Najjar added, lend credence to biblical accounts of the rivalry between Edom and the Israelites in what was then known as Judah. By extension, they said, this supported the tradition that Judah itself had by the time of David and Solomon, in the early 10th century, emerged as a kingdom with ambition and the means of fighting off the Edomites.

The Hebrew Bible mentioned the Edomites no fewer than 99 times. In Genesis, Esau, Jacob's twin brother, is described as the ancestor of the Edomites, and a reference is made to "the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites." Dr. Levy said this statement showed that the Israelites acknowledged Edom's early political development.

In the context, Dr. Levy and Dr. Najjar wrote, "the biblical references to the Edomites, especially their conflicts with David and subsequent Judahite kings, garner a new plausibility."

Historians and archaeologists who generally endorse the new findings welcomed the more precise dating of ruins in the under-explored region and the attention focused on copper production in Edomite history. But they cautioned against interpretations that might encourage uncritical reliance on the Bible as a source of early history.

Most criticism has come from advocates of a "low chronology" or "minimalist" school of early biblical history. They contend that in David's time Edom was a pastoral society, and Judah not much more advanced. In this view, ancient Israel did not develop into a true state until the eighth century B.C., a century and a half after David.

More widely held in recent years is the estimate that Edom did not become a complex society and kingdom until the eighth or seventh centuries, presumably as a consequence of rule by the Assyrian empire.

Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and a leading proponent of the low-chronology model, has said the new research does "not shed new light on the question of state formation in Edom." He argues that perhaps the copper operations were controlled by chieftains in Beersheba, to the west, and supplied material for urban centers west and north of Edom.

Dr. Levy and Dr. Najjar said their excavations showed that "this image of external control is not convincing."

Piotr Bienkowski of the University of Manchester, England, and Eveline van der Steen of East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., who have excavated the Edomite highlands, criticized the statistical analysis of the new dating and suggested that the data had been used to support an unjustified interpretation.

"One 'fortress' does not make a kingdom," they argued in a paper. Dr. Levy said the most advanced statistical methods were applied in analyzing the radiocarbon dates, and the laboratory work was conducted at Oxford and the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

"We realize that our work is far from complete, " Dr. Levy said, and a large team from the University of California will return this fall to Khirbat en-Nahas for a deeper look into the early history of the Edomites.

"The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Dr Rafael Nunez of the University of California, San Diego, who reports the finding in the journal Cognitive Science with Prof Eve Sweetser of the University of California.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of Adam".

For the study Dr Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile that included discussions of past and future events. The Aymara language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past" and "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean ''future." Thus the expression "nayra mara" - which means "last year" - can be literally translated as "front year".

Elderly Aymara referred to the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and swept forward with their hands and arms for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm for ancient times.

The find may call into question a once dominant archaeological picture of the pre-Columbian Caribbean.

Previous theories held that a few big or budding civilizations existed on the mainland of Central America, with only isolated, village-based societies on islands in the Caribbean Sea.

The new analysis gives weight to a competing view, which suggests that organized, long-distance trade networks were based primarily on those islands.

"There has been a closed mind-set that these [ancient] people out here were primitive, but we are learning there was a whole world out here we don't yet fully know about," said Reg Murphy, an archaeologist at the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda in St. John's, Antigua.

Murphy collaborated with Harlow on the research.

Murphy says it's likely that complex societies not only existed on the islands but also communicated with other cultures in South America along the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers.

"Those rivers [in South America] were highways of exchange that extended around the coast all the way to Guatemala," he said.

Harlow and Murphy's research team reported its findings in the April issue of the journal Canadian Mineralogist.

Saladoid Culture

The small, triangular jade blades found in Antigua are relics of the Saladoid culture, a society named for its home region along the Orinoco River in modern-day Venezuela (See map of Venezuela).

Known for their elaborate pottery, the Saladoid spread to Caribbean islands as far north as Puerto Rico by 500 B.C.

Archaeologists have excavated jade items in the West Indies before, but the source of the jade has been a puzzle, Harlow explains.

No jade deposits are known to exist in the eastern Caribbean. Also, many archaeologists have held that the Saladoid were insulated from the wider world, their travels limited to short canoe trips between islands.

Harlow says the jade used to make the Antigua blades is of a distinct, very hard form called jadeite.

Only a dozen jadeite surface deposits are known in the world, including a vein on the north side of Guatemala's Motagua River Valley, he adds.

But until recently Guatemalan jade deposits did not match the Antigua jade or other, high-quality forms found in some Maya tombs.

Then came the devastating rains of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Violent runoff brought chunks of extremely high quality jade careering down the rocky gorges on the south side of the Motagua River.

"As soon as we heard about that, we started looking for its source," said Harlow, a veteran of previous work in the region.

His team found jadeite there of a quality beyond anything recently mined in Guatemala, he says.

The samples they brought back came just in time to answer questions about the Antigua jade pieces.

Shortly after the new deposits were discovered, Harlow received the Antigua blades, dated from 250 to 500 A.D., from the late University of Calgary archaeologist Alfred Levinson.

Harlow says he immediately suspected that the axe blades were from the newly confirmed deposits, based on the jade's unique composition.

He compared the texture of both the Antiguan and Guatemalan jade and measured their ratios of minerals such as mica, albite, omphacite, and quartz.

Harlow found that the newfound deposits and the Antigua pieces bore the same distinctive quartz grains, which are absent from jade mined anywhere else, he says.

"If that [Antigua] stuff is not from Guatemala, the fates are playing some kind of game," Harlow said.

Proof of Trade?

Among those welcoming the finding is archaeologist Richard Callaghan of the University of Calgary, who was not part of Harlow's team.

He has studied remains of early Caribbean island societies for decades. He says the discovery provides new evidence of long-range trade in the pre-Columbian Caribbean.

Based on his research of Saladoid pottery and other artifacts, Callaghan believes that the civilization was sophisticated enough to maintain organized, long-distance contact with other cultures.

"I think those guys could go by boat straight from Puerto Rico or other islands all the way to [Mexico's] Yucatán [Peninsula]," he said.

The trade routes were most likely traveled by big, seaworthy canoes, Callaghan says. The vessels may have resembled the dugout logs seen centuries later by Spanish explorers.

Such seafaring ability, Callaghan adds, may have persisted well after the Saladoid culture faded around A.D. 1000.

The culture was replaced by Caribbean peoples collectively called the Taino, whom the Spanish later conquered and all but exterminated.

Murphy, the Antigua curator, shares Callaghan's expansive view of the Saladoid's cultural reach.

Murphy hopes the jade-axe findings may spur further study into the origins of other exotic, elaborately carved stones found among Saladoid relics.

For example, he says, some Saladoid artifacts are made of a type of turquoise not known to occur naturally anywhere in the Caribbean.

"It could have come all the way from Chile," Murphy said.