enabled the 960 inhabitants of the fortress to resist the RomansÆ assault until AD 73. According to Josephus, when the Jews of Masada, known as the Sicarii, saw the inevitability of being overrun and either killed as rebels or dispersed as slaves, the leadership engaged in a mass murder of women and children and mass suicide of themselves. When the Romans breached the fortress, they found the bodies of the dead, along with ostraca, or potsherds; this led Josephus to indicate that the leadership had cast lots to see who would kill the dependents and who would commit suicide. Both ostraca and jars with Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions, as well as fragments of Hebrew scrolls, have been uncovered at Masada (Hurvitz, 1997). Some of the ostraca are inscribed with Jewish names.
Modern archaeological examination of Masada was undertaken extensively between 1963 and 1965, supervised by Yigael Yadin, professor of archaeology at Hebrew University who had formerly been a military intelligence officer in the Israeli army. Yadin's initial archaeological efforts appeared to confirm much of Josephus's story. From the ostraca, according to Josephus, the Romans inferred that some leaders had killed the women and children and that some or all of the men had committed suicide, to avoid capture by the Romans. From piles of burned debris, it was similarly inferred that the Sicarii had gathered all their possessions and destroyed them so that the Romans would not obtain them. This same inference was made by Yadin (1966), who found the name of Eleazar, the leader of the group, inscribed n one of the ostraca. Some 25 skeletons (the only ones) that were found at Masada were given a state burial by the government of Israel (Yadin, 1966).
The modern view of the end of the siege is critical of the Josephus and of the apparent influence exerted by Josephus's account of the Jewish Revolt on Yadin. Cohen (1982) takes the view that Josephus attributed to Masada ...