In the first century B.C.E., Herod the Great, who ruled Judea as client king on behalf of Rome, built a fortified palace atop the mountain of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea.  Seventy years after Herod's death, the First Jewish Revolt against Rome broke out and Jewish rebels occupied Masada.  According to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus, at the end of the revolt the Romans besieged the mountain and the Jewish rebels committed mass suicide.  In this slide-illustrated lecture, we survey the history and archeology of Masada, focusing on the results of excavations in the Roman siege works which Professor Jodi Magness co-directed in 1995.  We end by considering the controversies surrounding Josephus’ story of mass suicide.

Professor Jodi Magness holds a senior endowed chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism (since 2002). She is an archeologist and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published 11 books and dozens of articles on the archeology of ancient Palestine and Israel in the Roman, Byzantine, early Islamic, and Modern eras.