Masada

Where it sits. Masada is an isolated rock plateau on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert, standing above the western shore of the Dead Sea about 25 kilometres south of Ein Gedi. The summit is a rhomboid roughly 550 metres long by 270 wide, and the cliffs fall about 400 metres to the Dead Sea plain on the east and around 90 metres to the desert on the west — the asymmetry matters, because it explains both why the place was defensible and how it eventually fell. The rock is dolomite and chalk, dry to the point of sterility, with fewer than 50 millimetres of rain a year. Because the Dead Sea basin sits far below sea level, the summit is still only around 60 metres above the Mediterranean datum despite the drop on all sides.

Herod's fortress. Fortification began under the Hasmoneans, but the site as it survives is the work of Herod the Great, who built between roughly 37 and 15 BC and treated Masada as a bolt-hole against both his own subjects and Cleopatra. He solved the water problem with twelve enormous rock-cut cisterns on the northwestern flank, filled by aqueducts that diverted the rare flash floods of two wadis — a system capable of holding some 40,000 cubic metres, enough to support gardens and bathhouses on a rock with no spring. The Northern Palace is the architectural showpiece: three terraces stepped down the cliff face, connected by concealed stairs, with a semicircular colonnaded balcony on the top level, frescoed walls imitating marble, and a small Roman bathhouse with a hypocaust of squat brick pillars still standing. A separate Western Palace served ceremonial functions, and long storerooms held the provisions found carbonised in excavation.

The siege. After the Jewish revolt began in 66, a group of Sicarii took Masada and held it after Jerusalem fell in 70. The Roman governor Flavius Silva brought Legio X Fretensis, auxiliaries and Jewish prisoners, built a circumvallation wall around the entire mountain and eight camps whose outlines remain perfectly visible from the summit, then raised an assault ramp against the western spur where the cliff is lowest. The ramp still exists and is walked today. According to Josephus, the defenders — he gives 960 — chose death over capture on the night the wall was breached, drawing lots so that the last man killed himself. Modern archaeology has complicated the account rather than confirmed it: the excavations directed by Yigael Yadin in 1963 to 1965 found ostraca with names on them, storerooms burned, and remains that do not straightforwardly match the numbers. The story nonetheless became a founding narrative of modern Israel, and Israel Defense Forces units long held swearing-in ceremonies on the summit.

On screen. The definitive screen treatment is the 1981 American miniseries Masada, with Peter O'Toole as Flavius Silva and Peter Strauss as the Sicarii leader Eleazar ben Yair — a neat piece of casting symmetry, since O'Toole had ridden through Wadi Rum as Lawrence nineteen years earlier. It was shot on location beneath the real mountain, where the production built a full Roman camp and siege works at the foot of the western approach, at a scale that made the shoot one of the largest ever staged in Israel. The later CBS miniseries The Dovekeepers (2015), adapted from Alice Hoffman's novel about the women of the siege, took a very different route: its production was split across Malta, Jordan and Israel, so the Judaea on screen is an assembly of three countries rather than this mountain. Masada also recurs constantly in documentary work, which is why so much of the footage in circulation is aerial rather than dramatic.

Getting there and timing. Route 90 runs along the Dead Sea shore to the eastern visitor centre, about 90 minutes from Jerusalem and two hours from Tel Aviv. From that side a cable car climbs to the summit in three minutes, or the Snake Path zigzags up in roughly 45 to 60 minutes of steady climbing over about 350 metres of ascent; the parks authority closes it on hot mornings and reopens it before dawn for sunrise walkers, which is the classic way to arrive. The western side, reached via Arad, gives a much shorter walk up the Roman ramp and has a separate entrance and hostel. The summit is exposed with almost no shade; carrying three litres of water per person in warm months is standard advice. The cable car and the marked summit circuit make a substantial part of the site accessible to wheelchair users, though the palace terraces involve stairs. A sound and light show runs on the western side in season.