In 1963, Yigael Yadin climbed Masada with thousands of volunteers from twenty-eight countries. Yadin wasn’t just an archaeologist — he’d commanded Israel’s army during its 1948 war of independence. Now he was digging into the desert fortress where, in 73 CE, nearly a thousand Jewish rebels chose death over surrender to Rome. The ancient historian Josephus claimed that on the final night, ten men were chosen by lot to kill everyone else. Yadin wanted to find those lots.
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Riddles of the Past·3/5·1′
The place
Masada
The Lots of the Ten
Eleven pottery shards, three skeletons, and a woman's braided hair -- the archaeological discoveries that both proved and questioned the Masada legend
1963-1965 (Yadin's excavation); 1969 (state funeral); 1982-2019 (scholarly debate)Masada
Moral of the Story
“The line between discovering the past and constructing it is thinner than we like to believe. Every archaeologist who lifts an artifact from the earth makes a choice about what story it tells -- and the stories we most want to be true are the ones we must examine most carefully. The braided hair, the inscribed shards, the scattered bones: they are real. What they mean is something we decide.”
Characters
Y
Yigael Yadin -- archaeologist, former IDF Chief of Staff, excavator of MasadaT
The woman with braided hair -- an unnamed 17-18 year old whose remains were found in the Northern PalaceN
Nachman Ben-Yehuda -- Hebrew University sociologist who challenged the Masada mythJ
Joe Zias -- physical anthropologist who questioned the identification of the bonesS
Sarah Sallon -- scientist who germinated a 2,000-year-old seed from MasadaSource
Yadin, Yigael. Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand, 1966; Cohen, Shaye J.D. 'Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus,' Journal of Jewish Studies 33, 1982; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada, Humanity Books, 2002; Zias, Joe. 'Human Skeletal Remains from the Southern Cave at Masada,' in The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years After Their Discovery, 2000; Sallon et al. 'Germination, Genetics, and Growth of an Ancient Date Seed,' Science 320, 2008