Herod's Large Bathhouse

The bathhouse sits on a small hill immediately south of the Northern Palace, on the high ground at the northern tip of the plateau. ICOMOS describes that cluster, the palace, the bathhouse and a storage complex of eighteen long rooms, thirteen of them 26 metres long, as a defensible acropolis at the highest point of the hilltop. Encyclopaedia Judaica places the public storerooms east and south of the bathhouse, so the building a visitor walks through today is boxed in on two sides by what was once the food supply of the mountain.

It went up in Herod's main building phase, which ICOMOS dates to the mid-20s BCE, alongside the Northern Palace, the storerooms and the great cisterns. That is the phase in which, on the same reading, the architecture at Masada stops being scattered and becomes Roman in style and tradition, laid out to a plan in two complexes, one around each palace.

Who it was for is not settled. ICOMOS calls it the large bathhouse "for the use of the king and his family and guests". The Israeli foreign ministry's account, republished by the Jewish Virtual Library, says it "probably served the guests and senior officials of Masada", and points out that Herod already had a private bathhouse of his own on the lowest terrace of the Northern Palace, a few minutes' walk downhill. Both can be true of a building used across forty years, and neither is anchored in an inscription.

• On a low rise just south of the Northern Palace, at the north end of the summit
• Storerooms east and south of it: 18 long rooms, 13 of them 26 m
• Built in the main Herodian phase, mid-20s BCE
• A second, smaller bathhouse belongs to Herod's private quarters on the lower terrace

A Roman bath is a route rather than a room, and this one still reads as a route. The parks authority's description starts at the entrance courtyard surrounded by columns, which served as exercise space, the palaestra of a Roman bath. From there the bather went into the dressing room, the apodyterium, which the authority describes as decorated with frescoes and special floor tiles. An opening in its wall leads to the stepped pool of the cold room, the frigidarium. From the warm room, the tepidarium, an opening on the east side leads into the hot room, the caldarium.

The finishes changed during the building's life. ICOMOS records that the whole complex was originally laid with mosaic floors and wall paintings, and that the floor mosaics were later replaced with coloured stone slabs, opus sectile. Encyclopaedia Judaica is more specific: mosaic in every room except the cold one, replaced by pink and black triangular tiles, with frescoes on the walls throughout. It also notes a Greek inscription praising the tyche found on the changing room wall, which is the sort of thing that survives in a bathhouse and nowhere else.

One caution about labels. The parks authority and Encyclopaedia Judaica both identify the stepped pool as the frigidarium, the cold room. The ICOMOS evaluation calls the same stepped pool a tepidarium. Nothing on the ground changes either way, but the room names on a signboard and the room names in a report do not always agree, and this is one of the places where they do not.

• Palaestra: a courtyard ringed with columns, used for exercise
• Apodyterium: the changing room, frescoed, with a decorated floor
• Frigidarium: a stepped pool entered through an opening in the wall
• Tepidarium: the warm room, opening east into the hot room
• Caldarium: the hot room, the largest, once barrel-vaulted

The caldarium is the reason to slow down. Its floor was never laid on the ground: it was suspended, and it still is. Encyclopaedia Judaica puts the count at about 200 tiny columns, mostly made of bricks, standing in rows in the void underneath. That void is the hypocaust. A furnace outside drove hot air into it, and the air passed under the floor and then up the walls through clay pipes set inside a double skin, so that the whole shell of the room radiated heat rather than a single hearth.

The Israeli foreign ministry's description of the same room is written from the engineer's end and matches: a suspended floor supported by rows of low pillars, making it possible to blow hot air from the furnace outside, under the floor and through clay pipes along the walls, to heat the room to the desired temperature. ICOMOS adds that the caldarium had a barrel-vaulted roof and that the remains of the heating furnaces and the water installations are still on site.

Water arrived hot at the far end. Encyclopaedia Judaica records hot water running into a bathtub and into a quartz fountain set in the room's niches. What a visitor sees now is the underside of the system rather than the surface of it: the columns bare, a section of the raised floor slabs still bridging them at one side, and the flue channels open in the wall. The parks authority adds that the bathhouse roof gives a view over the entire plateau, without saying how the roof is reached.

A bathhouse in the Judaean Desert is an argument about water, and the answer is on the slope below. ICOMOS records two rows of rock-cut cisterns dug in the main phase: a lower row of four, 130 metres below the summit, each holding 4,000 cubic metres, and an upper row of eight, 50 metres higher, each able to take 3,000 cubic metres. Encyclopaedia Judaica gives a dozen cisterns totalling about 40,000 cubic metres, which is the same system counted the same way. Dams and plastered channels in the wadis west of the mountain diverted winter floodwater into them.

Getting it from there to the bath was a haul. Encyclopaedia Judaica identifies the northern gate in the casemate wall, the water gate, as standing near the bathhouse and serving mainly to bring water up from the upper row of cisterns. The gate and the bathhouse are neighbours for a reason: every bath drawn here had been carried through that opening by hand or by animal, from a cistern that had filled during a flash flood that might not come.

Josephus, who never saw the place, was told enough about it to be right in outline. Writing of Herod's works on the rock he says that the furniture of the buildings, of the cloisters and of the baths was of great variety and very costly, and that the walls and floors were paved with stones of several colours. The opus sectile underfoot in the changing room is that sentence, checked.

The rebels took Masada in 66 CE and stayed until 73 or 74 CE, and they did not leave the bathhouse alone. The parks authority states that during the revolt a ritual immersion installation was built in the dressing room. Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the same alteration in more detail: an immersion pool, and a bench made from dismantled pillar drums, put into a room that had been Herod's changing room. Two sources, one operator and one reference work, describing the same intervention independently.

That fits the wider picture on the summit. ICOMOS records seven or eight ritual baths identified at Masada, including a large stepped immersion pool south of the Western Palace. Britannica goes further and says the synagogue and ritual bath found on Masada are the earliest yet found in Palestine. Whatever else the people on the rock were, they were building miqva'ot inside a Roman leisure building, using its own columns as the raw material.

The last layer is Roman again. Encyclopaedia Judaica reports a charcoal graffito of Legio X Fretensis in the bathhouse, left by the soldiers who took the place. Jodi Magness, who has excavated at Masada, records twenty-two ostraca inscribed in Latin with the names of Roman soldiers found in the vicinity of the large bathhouse, among them Aemilius, Fabius and Terentius, and notes that they are unusual in being written on the inside of the sherd rather than the outside. A garrison stayed on at Masada into the early second century, and this is one of the few buildings on the mountain where its handwriting survives.

• Immersion pool cut into the Herodian changing room during the revolt
• Its bench built from dismantled column drums
• Charcoal graffito of Legio X Fretensis on a bathhouse wall
• 22 Latin ostraca with legionaries' names found nearby

Yigael Yadin's Hebrew University expedition excavated Masada from 1963 to 1965 and uncovered most of the structures on the summit. The parks authority's own brochure says plainly that during the excavations many buildings were conserved and reconstructed, and that the national park opened in 1966 once the site had been prepared for visitors. Conservation and restoration have been the parks authority's job ever since.

How much of that counts as rebuilding is the question a visitor actually wants answered, and the fullest published answer is in the ICOMOS evaluation written for the World Heritage nomination. It found that the buildings had collapsed gradually and lain covered until the 1960s, and that there have been "no additions or reconstruction (beyond an acceptable level of anastylosis)". Anastylosis means re-erecting the original fallen pieces in their original positions, which is a different act from building a replica, though the visual result can look similar from a distance.

The same report is blunt about the first round of work. Conservation began the moment the excavators moved out, following a plan drawn up by a committee of specialists to the prevailing standards of the day, which involved Portland cement, and ICOMOS noted in 2001 that the cement was by then almost entirely replaced. So the honest description of the caldarium is that the columns, the flue pipes and the fabric are ancient, that fallen elements have been stood back up, and that some of the mortar holding the whole thing together is modern and has itself been changed once already.

Masada's management plan rules out further research excavation on the summit "in the present generation", allowing limited digging only where conservation requires it.