A Georgia Girl in Germany: Masada

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Masada

After a few days in Israel, we had another day off from work. This time, we headed to Masada and the Dead Sea. To get there from Tel Aviv, we skirted around Jerusalem, through Mount Scopus, into the West Bank and through the Sinai Desert. It was amazing how quickly the landscape changed after we passed Jerusalem. We stopped briefly when we came to a sign indicating we had traveled down in elevation to sea level. I figured I would have been ripped-off if I had gotten off the bus to take a photo of the camel, so I snapped a few shots through the bus window instead.

The landscape was very mundane -- lots of sand, lots of hills, and not much else ... and more of the same.

We passed a few “green” spots along the way (although not enough that I was able to capture them on my camera). Our tour guided told us that they had more rain than usual, therefore more flowers and bushes were in bloom. Apparently they greenery doesn’t take a chance on missing the opportunity to bloom -- if it rains one day, they bloom the next.

This was my first view of the Dead Sea. The hills on the other side are in Jordan. When we finally made it to the top of Masada, my cell phone kept alerting me to the per-minute charges to place a call from Jordan. The satellite signal was a little off, since I wasn’t actually in Jordan.

After driving south along the shore of the Dead Sea for about half an hour, we came to Masada. You can easily see how this plateau could be used as a fortress, 1,300 feet above the Dead Sea. The first fortress at Masada was believed to have been built during the Hasmonean Period (103 – 76 B.C.), although no architectural remains have been discovered to support this claim with certainty. Herod (who reigned 37 – 4 B.C.) was aware of Masada’s strategic importance, and chose the site as a refuge against his enemies and as a winter palace. He had luxurious palaces, well-stocked storerooms, cisterns and a casemate wall built. After his death, the Romans stationed a garrison at Masada. Shortly after 66 A.D., Masada was conquered by a rebel community of Jews, Essenes and Samarians, who by 70 A.D. were living at the fortress under the command of Eleazar Ben Yair. In 73 A.D., Masada remained the last rebel stronghold in Judea.

Looking eastward from the top of Masada, you can see the sediment of the Dead Sea. The dark layers were left behind during winter, while the light layers were left behind during summer. The Dead Sea used to reach this far toward Masada, but the sea has retreated greatly over the years.

Rather than hiking up the Snake Path to the top, we took a cable-car. After reaching the summit, ancient visitors would likely make their way to the southeastern entrance of the Northern Palace, where they reached a planned compound containing two buildings with an entrance square between them. The rooms of these buildings were richly painted, some with wall paintings. Excavators concluded that this was the main entrance square to the storerooms and the Northern Palace, containing the headquarters of the commandant of Masada. From here, one could control the traffic of visitors to the palace while overseeing the unloading of goods at the entrance to the storerooms. If you look very closely, you can see a black line in the bricks that indicates the height of the original remains. Everything above the black line has been restored.

The view of the Dead Sea from the top of Masada was amazing, as well as depressing. The Dead Sea is shrinking significantly each year, and at its southern end (near Masada) is rather narrow.

This is the grand residence -- or the commandant’s residence -- of Masada. It had a central courtyard surrounded by rooms that later served as home to rebel families. The stones used for Masada’s construction came from atop the plateau. Since Masada is located along the Syrian-African rift, it consisted extensively of cracked rock, which made quarrying it much easier.

Masada had a Roman-style bathhouse near the Northern Palace. This is the caldarium -- hot room. You can see the black line running through the bricks indicating the height of the original walls. This room has a few remaining frescoes on the walls and a double floor. The upper floor stood on brick and stone columns, while hot air flowed under the floor and rose through clay pipes embedded in the walls.

Herod had a massive storeroom complex built to hold food, liquids and weapons. The secret of survival in an emergency in this isolated and remote desert location remains an intriguing question. No doubt, the huge complex of storerooms was critical to survival. There were 29 long rooms surrounded by corridors, with the rooms organized by contents -- liquids and foods stored separately, and with a special wing for storing large quantities of weapons and the raw materials for their manufacture. The room that was designed to store olive oil had holes in the ground to capture and reuse the oil that spilled if jars broke! When the rebels took the fortress, they found well-preserved food supplies, which were attributed to the arid conditions. From the date of storage to when the fortress was captured, nearly a century had elapsed! Of all the desert fortresses, Masada was best prepared for a lengthy siege with a large population.

“For here had been stored a mass of corn, amply sufficient to last for years, abundance of wine and oil, besides every variety of pulse and piles of dates.”
-- Josephus Flavius

We didn’t travel down to Herod’s Northern Palace, but this is a view of the middle terrace from above. The palace was built to host high-ranking visitors and to allow King Herod his solitude. He and his family lived on the upper level, while the two lower levels were used for receptions. A flight of stairs once connected the upper terrace to the lower levels, but it was destroyed in an earthquake.

This model clearly shows the Northern Palace with the plateau above and behind it.

Getting fresh water for Masada’s residents was critical. One of Herod's first undertakings was to create an intricate water supply system -- of crucial importance in the arid climate. Herod quarried numerous cisterns on the summit and the northwestern slope to store reainwater that flowed in the floods in nearby streams. The water was collected by a system of two dams and two aqueducts. Some of these open aqueduct channels are still clearly visible in the valley to the west of Masada. Josephus Flavius described Masada's water supply as “in quantity no less than that of those who had springs at their disposal.” The diamond-shaped area just beyond this channel is the remains of a Roman camp that was established to break the siege against the rebels in ~73-74 A.D.

The channels directed water into 12 huge cisterns on Masada’s rocky slopes. The lower cisterns could hold more than 10.5 million gallons of water! Once there, pack animals would carry the water up to the cisterns on the mountaintop.

This model shows the extensive system of channels that directed water to the base of Masada to sustain the fortress. Herod was not content with merely drinking water, and included water for hygiene and recreation -- as evident from the bathhouses and swimming pool on the southern part of the mountain.

During the final days of the rebel siege, the Romans built eight camps around Masada, a siege wall and a ramp made of earth and wooden supports on a natural slope to the west. The ramp is still visible. After several months, the Romans brought a tower with a battering ram up the ramp and began to batter the wall. The rebels constructed an inner support wall out of wood and earth, which the Romans then set on fire. Rather than being taken slaves, the leaders of the 960-member community decided it would be better to take their own lives and those of their families than to be taken as Roman slaves.

“The Romans, expecting further opposition ... were at a loss to conjecture what had happened... Here encountering the mass of the slain, instead of exulting as over enemies, they admired the nobility of their resolve and the contempt of death displayed by so many in carrying it, unwavering, into execution.”
-- Josephus Flavius

This is the view looking west, toward where the Romans had their camps and attacked Masada. It was very windy on this side of the plateau.

Near where the siege was broken is the Byzantine church, evidence of the monks who settled in the ruins between the 5th and 7th centuries. These monks lived in small buildings, caves and cisterns that had gone out of use, and brought water up from the cisterns on the slopes and from renovated cisterns on the summit. The western room of the church contains a mosaic depicting floral designs and medallions encircling fruit and baskets of communion bread. The walls are decorated with a design created from pottery shards inserted into plaster.

On the southern end of the 20-acre fortress is a large cistern that we climbed down into. The entrance was tucked away, almost out of sight from the expanse above.

It really was quite a ways down, and the steps were rather steep. The walls were covered with many layers of plaster. The window above overlooked Mount Eleazar -- if you had a way to get to the window to peer out.

Once we came out of the Southern Water Cistern, we had a beautiful view of Mount Eleazar. The Dead Sea is to the left ...

... and the Roman camps were to the right and behind.

The southern fort provided a good vantage point to watch the southern approach to Masada. Masada was once accessible via the southern cliff, so this fort was necessary.

This small room toward Masada’s southern tip was a mikveh -- a Jewish ritual bath house. This bath house was used by commoners rather than by Herod and his family.