The Myth Of The Masada | Archeology (Ancient Fortress Documentary) | Timeline

masada the site of an astonishing tale of heroism a few hundred jewish families holding off thousands of Roman soldiers choosing in the end death / enslavement but in the modern dance of politics and archeology did the real story of this ancient battle get lost hello I'm John rhys-davies join me as we relive the siege of Masada next on archaeology [Music] in the year 66 ad at the beginning of the Jewish rebellion against Rome a band of Jewish rebels called zealots captured this mountain fortress by the Dead Sea here at Masada 960 defenders including women and children held some 15,000 Roman soldiers at bay for almost two years [Music] the Romans built a ramp up the side of the mountain and battered the walls of the fortress [Music] according to the Jewish historian josephus flavius who was in the employ of the Romans the zealots made a desperate decision to kill themselves rather than be delivered into the hands of their enemies as slaves when Roman soldiers pored through the broken walls of Masada they were greeted only by the silence of death in 1963 almost 2,000 years later Israel undertook an ambitious excavation at the flat top rock of Masada what they found appeared to match Josephus Flavius description in uncanny detail today however Masada is once again under siege some scholars questioned the story of the zealots last desperate hours where they asked are the bodies of the nine hundred or is the tale of the mass suicide nothing more than the hackneyed literary device of an ancient historian in fact did it happen at all [Music] ok ladies and gentlemen I would like to welcome you to the rock of MIT sudah which is a very important page in the book of history which called Israel if we are talking about heroism in this book this is the spot and this is the page I would like to go with you back around 2100 years ago King Herod took the road that we did today and when he came to the foot of Masada he said to himself I'm going to change this place into my winter result and what has become one of the most visited tourist sites in the world guides tell the story of the zealots last stand on their self-sacrifice as historical fact and when the Romans arrived to the top he found here food storage is full with food what a cistern full with water and 960 here Oh dead bodies laying around here left this world is free people not as Roman slaves Danny Bahat is not your average visitor at Masada he is a veteran archaeologist who took part in the 1963 excavation the place is so dear to me that I refrained from coming here I'm today here for the first time after seven years the idea is you know further from the eyes the more further we go it becomes more sublime perhaps at no other archaeological site in the world has the tension between the sublime and the real played itself out more dramatically than at Masada here in an unprecedented fusion of myth and archaeology the story of Masada took on a life of its own a life that had to do more with modern-day Israel than the siege of 2000 years when the young state of israel needed a symbol of national pride the call to excavate Masada enticed hundreds of volunteers from around the world but they found would not only excite archaeologists but would create something of a national shrine for Israel it became our national pilgrimage since we saw it in the last link which connects our country or our people to our country and we of course wanted to be know renew that link we went every year on a pilgrimage all the youth movements and everyone used to come to Masada in October 1963 the stronghold was laid open down to the foundations this time by the archaeologists a giant mission of exploration supported by volunteers from 29 different countries headed by professor eagerly edemen Gardein former head of the Israeli Defense Forces and the most celebrated archaeologists in Israel orchestrated the enormous undertaking at Masada he had a mission which had worldwide attention for a long time we've been the people of the book living in the land then for 2,000 years we have been the people of the book without the land now for the first time after 2,000 years we are again living in the land of the book my aim is I would say to live again as the people of the book in the land they began their assault on the mountain in the scorching desert in 1963 the excavation became next to the tomb of Tutankhamen one of the most publicized digs of the 20th century it was a very exciting time for young Israeli archaeologists like Gideon firsta and one can remember the very great excitement we had coming into the field starting our work on a unknown country the hundreds thousands of volunteers who took part in the unfolding of the history of Masada we had this for the site was actually some kind of a national site it was a national hope by everyone to be able to work on this site which was very difficult to excavate because of its it's so far away from any other center we had of course a lot of information particularly from Jersey firs and we were very eager to see if we were if our expectations were to be fulfilled in contrast to the painstaking tedium of an ordinary dig Masada yielded up important finds daily sometimes hourly things turn up every day every day it's not that kind of site where you dig for weeks and weeks that did you find something it's loaded he finds it was the greatest time of my life charred beams and blackened stones testified to a great configuration biblical Scrolls and a synagogue spoke of Jewish occupants catapult stones and Roman period arrowheads told of the intensity of the siege but it was the human remains that spoke most poignant ly to the archaeologists I'm non ben-tor remembers and I I think one of the most exciting days of my life not just professional like my general was when I was working in the Northern Pass of Masada and digging in the little bath of the northern Paris and meters of ashes and collapsed debris we uncovered the remains of three people man woman and a youngster the clothes the sandals the hair the blood on the stairs what was not read but brown or black here are the people who perished on the last night of Masada and and you can actually tell you do actually touch them and I don't think that there can be many moments in one's life that are more exciting than this was really excited [Music] another two dozen bodies were found in a cave on the southern side of the mountain fortress but it was Danny Bahat who would make an astounding find it's you yards from here away that the first which I found with my own hands the 11 shirts which bear names amongst them one who was a commander of Masada Ben Yair the other names were on the shirts were names which were kind of friendly names like the fat man the man from the valley belly of Giselle the man with the round hair rounded her the curly hair Joab the fish' and these are the ones I can recall now and benjão of course if this is not exciting I don't know what excitement means but you suddenly feel that you have bridged those 2000 years and you are making a continuity and this is the appeal of Masada but there was something profoundly unorthodox in the way archaeology was conducted in the heady days of those excavations in 1965 Israel was a nation that felt surrounded pressured from many sides and the Masada story had obvious resonance Neal Silberman an archaeologist trained in Israel is a longtime observer of the uneasy mix of politics and archaeology the excavations of Masada must not be seen as a normal archaeological excavation or scientific experiment in which rival scientific hypotheses are being tested it was instead under the direction of your Dean something of public performance art a national pageant with an entire nation for an audience with the entire world looking on though the excavations of Masada ended in 1965 the public life of the site escalated and perhaps even embellished the historical reality the Israeli Defense Forces began taking their national oath atop the ancient mountain fortress and a nation swore that Masada should never fall again [Music] but scholars today find the archaeological record is not in such perfect accord with a story of deceivers murmurs of doubt about the mass suicide Mossad has circulated why were there 11 shards bearing personal names when the historian josephus had reported 10 and why had only three skeletons been found in the northern Palace when Josephus had reported that the mass suicide of all 960 had taken place there well Josephus described that there were 960 zealots on the summit of Masada and took their own lives yeah Dean found only a little more than two dozen the fact that the bodies found in the cave on the southern side of the mountain those given a military funeral in 1969 were as yeah Dean himself publicly admitted mixed with the bones of pigs makes their identification with the zealots who were extremely particular about the observance of Jewish law at least problematic and what are the famous shards were the names of the defenders on them the 11 inscribed potsherds that yeah Dean suggested might have been the very Lots cast by the last 10 zealots before their suicide are also problematic in that hundreds if not thousands of inscribed potsherds were found over the surface of the mound and in fact inscribed potsherds seem to have been the method by which the zealots distributed food according to the Roman historian Josephus not all of the zealots died at the top of the rock of Masada five women and children hidden a water duct from the slaughter and lived to relate the horrifying final hours they told you Cephas of the magnificent speech given by the garrison commander Eleazar Ben Yair after the Romans had broken through the fortress walls and defeat was imminent convincing the rebels to choose death over capture scholars began to question the historical truth of Josephus besides a number of improbabilities in the story itself such as how the women and children who are hiding in a water cistern could have repeated verbatim that the the text of Eleazar Ben Yair 's suicide speech I think that it's fairly clear by now that Josephus like many classical authors was giving a melodramatic ending to a great epic the theme of suicide as a heroic ending for classical histories was common to people throughout the Greek and Roman worlds in that Josephus was really doing nothing new but giving and accepted in to his literary tale their reinterpretation of the Masada story would touch off a controversy about the famous mass suicide and add to a growing consternation about the place of the Masada myth in a nation's self-definition [Music] Colonel Meyer pile is Israel's leading military story there the pattern was more or less like this that the men killed their wives and children then they elected 10 people to kill the other ones the other men there and then the the last train once you're not elected one of them to kill the other nine and the only one who committed suicide was the last one so it should not be considered as a suicide but it was really I won't say Massacre it was a slaughter as far as what really happened at Masada there's no question that there was a slaughter and a brutal bloody defeat but what probably happened in the last moments of Masada was more chaos than suicide certainly some may have committed suicide others were killed yet others taken into slavery to assume that Josephus's story is literally correct is to misunderstand what he was trying to say and it's even more ironic that even for a time an entire nation would take what was a melodramatic ending for a national ideal the theory that the mass suicide of Masada was nothing more than a literary cliche has gotten a mixed reception among the original excavators of the site it is a two story it is a two story which we hear about from Josephus Flavius we believe Josephus Flavius and everything he did we discovered in Masada every possible physical proof to what you see first Flavius says there's no way we can prove one way or the other so for those of us who want to believe the story verbatim that this is what happened they committed suicide for others they were killed when the roof collapsed on their heads one way or the other these are the last defenders of Masada and that's the big thing it doesn't matter if the story of Josephus is a hundred percent so some of us need it to be exactly so I don't think it's really important well well it is it is not a myth because after all I mean the thing happened the question is what was the significance for the history of this country for the people of Israel every archaeologist is in a sense a myth maker contributing by his discoveries to the creation of a share story of the past this is where myth gets fused with politics but Neal Silverman thinks that the world of archeology is never immune to the power of political myth for him Masada is a cautionary tale I think the danger of a huge project like Masada so focused in so so entirely devoted in the public mind to a single historical incident is that archaeologists can lose control of its political significance to politicians and other leaders who have very different agendas and different objectives to use the past and for some even the act of suicide is inappropriate as a symbol of national pride and according to Jewish tradition usually we would prefer life to death even if you are doomed to be a slave you fight if there is no choice if you stand with your back to the wall you fight until you fight for whatever it is you believe in and if it you need to die you die but this is not an idea to die for one's country the idea is to live for one's country Sharyl Spivak came from California to find she had a different feeling about the story of Masada once she walked in these ruins there's in to my mind a prevailing sense of sadness here of loss people killing their children bothered me a great deal Masada in some ways is a sign of failure of giving up of bowing to the inevitable catastrophes that happen in life giving in to them I thought once that Masada should be developed as a myth in order to you know create bravery within our forces but now following the six-day war I think that Masada is obsolete Colonel Maya Pyle in charge of training young army recruits at the time has gone through something of a change of heart about the use of Masada for national purposes let's put it this way our educational and political authorities maybe even military authorities they use it for two different sakes the first one is to try to educate the army to be brave and fight till the death etc basically which I don't accept because I don't consider this a real you know symptom of bravery and other intention is to demonstrate to the Jewish people in Israel the I would say the negative outcome of a disaster of a total disaster out of which we should learn what should we do in order to avoid another massacre [Music] but about 30 20 years ago we started the reassessment and we change it now basically you won't find an Israeli unit who would come there and swear and also to take it out there at the time of the excavations Masada provided a metaphor of heroic self-sacrifice for the modern nation under siege but in a land where myth and history intermingle freely many now question the wisdom of defining a national consciousness through a tale of zealotry and suicide we should face Masada as it was and I think that from the point of view of culture and morale and humanistic in Jewish tradition we should deny Masada [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, masada, masada documentary bbc, masada documentary, masada israel documentary, archeology documentary bbc, israel documentary history channel, judean desert israel, judean desert masada, judean desert map, king herod documentary, roman documentary

Id: CB7_qQ-L0bA

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020