Nothing new at Masada

Round and round we go. Like a merry-go-round. Academics seem desperate to publish, and if they have nothing new, they pretend they have something new.

I have just read “Le siège de Masada (73–74 après J.‐C.)” by Sophie Krausz, a Professor of Archaeology at the Paris Sorbonne. (The paper appears in HiMA. Revue internationale d’Histoire Militaire Ancienne 14, 2025, 323–342.)

It is, firstly, noticeable that Professor Krausz has chosen to refer to the work of Josephus using the (very) old-fashioned book–chapter–section method, rather than Niese’s (otherwise universally employed) book-and-verse method. Thus, her reference to “Guerre des Juifs VII, 8, 5” (for example) could apply to any one of the sixteen sentences (304–319) that Niese divided this long passage into.

Be that as it may, after some lengthy scene-setting — and confusion over dates (the article title implies a lengthy siege spanning AD 73–74, but the text plumps squarely for 73, although a footnote mentions my 1988 suggestion of 74 without discussion) —, Professor Krausz turns to the Roman circumvallation, for which she uses the peculiarly French term contrevallation, coined in the nineteenth century by Napoléon III. That is certainly her choice to do so.

But she also suggests that the Roman siegeworks utilized an earlier enceinte built by Herod the Great; something for which there is not even the slightest evidence. This is, I think, rather more problematic.
“Hérode aurait pu en effet aménager au cours de la phase 3, non seulement un rempart de couronnement au sommet du rocher, mais également une enceinte basse de contour pour protéger et contrôler l’ensemble des accès à Masada”. (“As part of Phase 3, Herod might have built not only a crowning rampart on the summit of the mountain, but also a low boundary wall to protect and control all access to Masada”. Note that Israeli archaeologists have divided the construction of Herod’s palace into three phases, the last of which they date to 15 BC.)

Her reasoning seems to be: (a) modern scholars have suggested between one and two weeks for the construction of the Roman circumvallation; (b) this seems to her to be too short a time; (c) so there must already have been an existing wall, which required only refurbishment by the Romans.

Professor Krausz then turns her attention to the Roman “rampe d’assaut”, a frequent feature of Roman sieges known as an agger or “embankment” (χῶμα, “heap” in Greek). Here she claims to present “une nouvelle reconstitution de la rampe d’assaut construite contre le rempart à casemates couronnant le sommet de la citadelle” (“a new reconstruction of the assault ramp built against the casemated rampart crowning the summit of the citadel”), along with this diagram.

It doesn’t seem to be new, and the Professor doesn’t indicate which parts she thinks are new. Compare her graphic (above) with this picture (left), which is page 176 of my 2006 book Besieged (based on my 2002 Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Aspects of Roman Siegecraft”).

The only difference that I can see concerns Professor Krausz’s pile of logs (are they logs?) at the top of the embankment, which she has labelled “cavalier”, another peculiarity of nineteenth-century French vocabulary. (Incidentally, I recently discussed the terminology of Roman siegecraft in Brill’s 2019 Companion to Sieges in the Ancient Mediterranean, but this book is not included in Professor Krausz’s bibliography.)

The Professor doesn’t explain this log pile: “Nous n’avons pas d’indications sur sa morphologie” (“we have no details of its morphology”), but she believes that this is Josephus’ ἐπιβάθρα (epibathra, “means of approach”: B.J. VII.307). My reading of Josephus differs from hers. Josephus here describes the entire embankment as the “means of approach”, and singles out “the top” as a βῆμα (bêma, “platform”). It is unclear whether, by “top”, he means the highest extremity or indeed the entire upper surface, and any discussion of the Roman siege really ought to explore this.

Professor Krausz chooses not to. Instead, she simply states: “un assemblage de grosses pierres, ce cavalier mesure 50 coudées de côté et autant en hauteur, soit 22m” (“an assemblage of large stones, this cavalier measured 50 cubits in breadth and the same in height, being 22m”). Ah, not logs but stones.

It is not easy to see how a siege tower might negotiate the final obstacle posed by this 22m-high platform. Professor Krausz tenatively suggests that “il faut peut-être envisager que la tour d’assaut ait été construite au sommet de la rampe, en totalité ou en partie” (“it may be necessary to imagine that the assault tower was built at the summit of the ramp, in whole or in part”). But couldn’t they just have built a taller tower?

And that’s it. End of discussion. In conclusion, Professor Krausz ponders that “la compréhension du siège de Masada passe par une étude minutieuse des données textuelles et archéologiques puis par la confrontation de l’ensemble des connaissances” (“an understanding of the siege of Masada requires a careful study of the textual and archaeological evidence and then a comparison of all knowledge”). An admirable goal, but not one that is represented by this article.