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In 72, the Roman governor of Iudaea Lucius Flavius Silva marched against Masada with the Roman legion X Fretensis and laid siege to the fortress. After failed attempts to breach the wall, they built a circumvallation wall and then a rampart against the western face of the plateau, using thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth.
Josephus does not record any attempts by the Sicarii to counterattack the besiegers during this process, a significant difference from his accounts of other sieges against Jewish fortresses. He did record a raid on a nearby Jewish settlement called Ein-Gedi during the siege, where the Sicarii killed 700 of its inhabitants.
Some historians also believe that Romans may have used Jewish slaves to build the rampart. According to Dan Gill,[4] geological observations in the early 1990s revealed that the 375-foot (114 m) high assault ramp consisted mostly of a natural spur of bedrock that required a ramp only 30 feet (9.1 m) high built atop it in order to reach the Masada defenses. This discovery would diminish both the scope of the construction and of the conflict between the Sicarii and Romans, relative to the previous perspective in which the ramp was an epic feat of construction.
The rampart was complete in the spring of 73, after approximately two to three months of siege, allowing the Romans to finally breach the wall of the fortress with a battering ram on April 16.[citation needed] When they entered the fortress, however,
the Romans discovered that its 960 inhabitants had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed mass suicide rather than face certain capture, defeat, slavery or execution by their enemies.
Wiki
Voices
Visitors have reported hearing moaning, voices, wailing and whistling.
Voices
Archaeologists studying the site have reported the sounds of voices and echoes of the epic siege on the wind.
[edit on Apr 15th 2010 by TheMythLives]
[edit on Apr 15th 2010 by TheMythLives]