The Roman Assault Ramp

Josephus says Silva walled the mountain in first and then looked for somewhere to attack from, and 'found but one single place that would admit of the banks he was to raise'. Behind the tower guarding the road that led up from the west there was a broad projection of rock, jutting out and standing three hundred cubits below the summit. He calls it the white promontory, Leuce in the Greek. Jodi Magness, who has excavated here, notes that a path to the top already ran up this side and now lies buried under the ramp: the Snake Path in the east and this western route were the two ways up the rock.

The problem the ramp solved was not access but exposure. Soldiers using either path would have had to climb in single file, carrying their equipment and the parts of a battering ram to be assembled at the top, under stones and missiles from the wall above. A ramp wide enough to walk up several abreast put the machines at the wall instead of the men.

The figures Josephus gives are the ones every account repeats. The bank was raised solid to two hundred cubits; on top of it went a platform of great stones fitted closely together, fifty cubits broad and fifty high; and on that a tower sixty cubits tall and plated all over with iron, from which the Romans shot to clear the defenders off the wall. A cubit is roughly half a metre. Silva's battering ram then broke down a part of the wall, and the defenders threw up a second wall inside it, built of parallel rows of timber packed with earth, which absorbed the blows rather than shattering. Silva had it burned. Josephus records that the wind first drove the flames back at the Romans and then turned and carried the fire into the wall.

The archaeology at the top of the ramp fits a fight rather than a formality. Yigael Yadin found iron arrowheads and ballista stones around the head of the ramp. Andrew Holley, who published the stones, read their relatively light weights as evidence of small-calibre engines aimed at people on the wall rather than at the wall itself, which is what covering fire looks like. The section of casemate wall directly above the ramp is missing.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Masada, written by Guy Stiebel, describes the work in one sentence: hewn from the nearby white spur, a mass of earth and stones stabilised by tamarisk and date palm branches was laid on the natural spur of the western slope. A stone platform paved the head of the ramp so the siege tower could be raised, and the engines themselves were most likely put together in a walled yard west of the ramp.

The best account of the fabric comes from the 1995 season, when Gideon Foerster, Benny Arubas, Haim Goldfus and Jodi Magness cut a section through the ramp a little over halfway up. Magness describes what the excavation found: the Romans took pieces of wood, mostly tamarisk and date palm, laid some flat and drove others in as vertical stakes to make a timber bracing, and filled it with packed stones, rubble and earth. The tips of those timbers still protrude near the bottom of the ramp. Her team did not reach the natural spur underneath, so the boundary between the hill and the work remains, in her account, something the geologists infer rather than something the diggers saw.

Above that stratum, what the ramp is made of is the mountain. Gill's 1993 note in Nature put the point sharply, and the geomorphological survey published by Haim Goldfus, Yoav Avni, Roy Albag and Benny Arubas in Catena in 2016 set out to separate the natural lower part from the man-made upper part. Gideon Hadas, writing in 2023, summarises the resulting picture: most of the ramp's volume is a natural spur, and the Roman contribution over it is a relatively thin layer of earth, about a metre thick, mixed with tamarisk trunks and palm branches for stability.

None of it was cheap to hold. The parks authority's own site brochure, written by Stiebel, gives the besieging force as the Tenth Legion Fretensis and auxiliaries, about 8,000 troops in all, and records that captive Jews carried water and food to them, apparently from Ein Gedi. Nothing on this shore supplies an army.

• Mostly a natural bedrock spur (Gill, Nature, 1993)
• Roman layer over it about a metre thick, with tamarisk and palm timbers
• Timber tips still visible near the foot of the ramp
• The excavators of 1995 never reached the spur itself

The Catena paper of 2016 is titled, without hedging, 'The significance of geomorphological and soil formation research for understanding the unfinished Roman ramp at Masada'. Roy Albag, one of its four authors, states the conclusion on his own project page: the assault ramp was never completed by the Romans and therefore could not have been operational.

Gideon Hadas took that further in the Journal of Jewish Archaeology in 2023. He measured the ramp at about three metres wide at the top, reaching fourteen metres below the base of the wall, and found no trace of the stone platform Josephus describes; a platform of the size Josephus gives could not stand on a base that narrow. Josephus's dimensions, he writes, are about twice what is there. Hadas concludes that a breach from the west is highly improbable, and argues instead that the ramp was a feint that drew the defenders to the western side while a Roman unit went up the Southern Ascent from Camp G and broke through the wooden door of the Southern Gate.

Not everyone reads it that way. The 1995 excavators and the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry both treat the missing section of casemate wall above the ramp as the breach itself, and Magness writes that the Romans erected a stone platform for the battering ram once the ramp was completed and that the large gap in the wall at the top of the ramp is still visible today. The 2024 study of the siege landscape in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, by Hai Ashkenazi, Omer Ze'evi-Berger, Boaz Gross and Guy Stiebel, likewise narrates the assault as following the ramp's completion, while cutting the whole siege down to weeks: it calculates that 5,000 soldiers could have thrown up the circumvallation wall and the camps in 11 to 16 days.

Researchers still differ, and the difference is not decorative: it decides whether the last act of the siege happened at the top of the path visitors walk up, or at the far end of the mountain. What is agreed is that the ramp has never been fully excavated, that its bulk is natural, and that the wall above it is broken.

The Roman Ramp Trail is a made path. The parks authority describes it as built over the ramp the Romans constructed from the west side, and the steps and handrails on it are its own work, not antiquity: this is not a Roman staircase and it never was one. Walking up, the surface underfoot is fine pale chalky dust and small stones, which Magness describes as poofing up in clouds underfoot.

The Roman work that is actually visible is modest and worth looking for. The tips of the bracing timbers show near the bottom. The bank of packed earth and rubble is the material of the path itself. At the top, the gap in the casemate wall is the one dramatic survival. There is no stone platform and no tower: the platform is absent from the ground and the tower existed only in wood and iron.

The western entrance complex is a modern visitor site rather than a ruin. There are enclosures interpreting the mountain and its defenders, models of Roman weapons, a picnic awning and a visitor service centre selling drinks, snacks, sunscreen and hats. The parks authority's night show, running on Tuesdays and Thursdays after sunset from May to December, is projected onto the mountain's western slope between the ramp and the Northern Palace, which means the ramp is part of the screen.

The other thing to look at from here is water. Herod's engineers dammed the channels of Wadi Masada to divert flood water into channels that filled twelve enormous cisterns cut on two levels into the northern slope, with a total capacity the parks authority gives as 40,000 cubic metres. Pack animals carried the water up through the Water Gate to storage cisterns on the summit. The parks authority says the northern cisterns are seen very well from the western entrance complex, and they are: nothing on the eastern side shows the water system this clearly.

The trail opens every day about thirty minutes before sunrise, and the parks authority expects visitors to look up sunrise times themselves. The climb takes about half an hour at intermediate difficulty, against about an hour at high difficulty for the Snake Path on the Dead Sea side. That difference is the whole argument for coming this way: the ramp path is the sunrise walk that does not require an hour of climbing in the dark.

Heat governs the closing times rather than the clock. On days of extreme summer heat the parks authority closes the ramp trail at 11:00 for ascent and 12:00 for descent. The same rule shuts the Snake Path at 07:00 and 08:00, and closes the Runner's Path and the Elazar Ascent at 07:00, so the ramp is the route that stays open longest on the worst days. The authority sets these times from the Israel Meteorological Service forecast, and warns that in extreme heat, wind or rain the published times can move.

There is no cable car on this side. Whatever you walk up you walk back down, or you cross the summit and descend the east face into a car park a long drive from your own. The two entrances are not connected by any road across the mountain. Everything at the eastern complex, including the Yigael Yadin museum, the film halls and the shops, is on the other side.

For a dawn start without an alarm at three in the morning, the Masada West campground sits at this entrance, is reached from Arad only, and takes arrivals from 15:00. Flash flooding in the wadis is a real hazard in winter, spring and autumn, and the parks authority asks visitors to check the forecast independently and to stay out of wadi beds when flooding looks likely.

• From Arad on road 3199; no access from the Dead Sea road
• Opens about 30 minutes before sunrise, every day
• About 30 minutes up, graded intermediate
• Extreme heat: last ascent 11:00, last descent 12:00
• No cable car and no museum on this side of the mountain