The Water Cisterns and Water System

Masada is flanked by two wadis, Wadi Ben Yair on the west and Wadi Masada on the south and east, and neither carries water except after rain. That is the whole problem the system was built to solve, and the solution was to treat a few hours of flood a year as the annual supply. Encyclopaedia Judaica describes dams that diverted the floodwater of the two wadis west of the mountain into two plastered channels, which fed the cistern array; the parks authority's own page for the western side describes dams built in the channels of Nahal Masada doing the same work.

The cisterns themselves are the engineering. Encyclopaedia Judaica counts a dozen of them, cut on two parallel levels into the rocky slope, mostly square in plan, each holding up to 4,000 cubic metres and the set together roughly 40,000. Each was given two openings: a lower one where the aqueduct discharged, and a higher one connected to an internal staircase so that water could be drawn out as the level fell. The staircase is the detail that explains what the interiors look like now, since a flight of cut steps running down one wall is the first thing visible from the mouth.

Getting the water the rest of the way up was done by animal. The parks authority says the water was carried on pack animals from the cisterns through the water gate to storage cisterns on the plateau. Encyclopaedia Judaica adds the routes: one passage climbed from the upper row of cisterns and ended at a gate just south of the Northern Palace, and another led from the lower row to the Snake Path.

The capacity figure is worth pausing on, because the published numbers do not agree. The parks authority and Encyclopaedia Judaica both give about 40,000 cubic metres for the slope cisterns. Britannica describes aqueducts bringing water to cisterns holding nearly 200,000 gallons, which it renders as 750,000 litres, and that is 750 cubic metres: less than a fiftieth of the other figure. The two statements cannot both be describing the same set of chambers, and which subset Britannica is counting is not stated on its page.

• 12 cisterns, cut into the slope on two levels
• Up to 4,000 cubic metres each, per Encyclopaedia Judaica
• Filled by plastered channels fed by dams in the wadi beds
• Two openings apiece: one for the channel, one over an internal staircase
• Water carried up by pack animal through the water gate to cisterns on the plateau

Josephus is the only ancient writer who describes the works, and he describes them without numbers. In the Whiston translation of The Wars of the Jews he writes that Herod "had cut many and great pits, as reservoirs for water, out of the rocks, at every one of the places that were inhabited, both above, and round about the palace, and before the wall: and by this contrivance he endeavoured to have water for several uses, as if there had been fountains there". The count of twelve, the two levels and the capacity all come from later survey and excavation, not from him.

What Josephus does supply is the reversal that makes the system worth the trouble. When the Roman governor Lucius Flavius Silva besieged the rock, it was the besiegers who had the supply problem: Josephus notes that food had to be fetched from a distance and that "water was also to be brought to the camp: because the place afforded no fountain that was near it". The people on top of the mountain were drinking rain caught by an engineer who had died a century earlier.

The same passage claims that Herod's stores of corn, wine, oil, pulse and dates were still edible when the Romans took the place, nearly a hundred years after they were laid in, and puts it down to the dryness of the air. That is Josephus asserting something, not an excavated fact, and it should be read as the flourish it is. The defensible point underneath it is narrower and better supported: thirst is not what ended the siege.

The route the parks authority published on 10 February 2024 starts and ends at the foot of the Roman ramp at Masada West, reached from Arad rather than from the Dead Sea road. It is graded as a linear there-and-back walk suitable for families, about 200 metres long and about 30 minutes for the round trip, and its listed points of interest are the cisterns, an ancient bridge and a lookout.

What is on it is unusually concrete for a site of this age. The path gives access to two of the cisterns and a view down into them. On the way it crosses a small bridge of the Roman period which carried the aqueduct over a gully and took people and pack animals as well. Sections of the channels survive alongside, and so does original plaster, which is the part most visitors do not expect: the waterproofing is the working surface of the system, and it is still on the rock.

It is worth being clear about what is ancient and what is not. The cisterns, the channel fragments, the bridge and the plaster are the remains. The walking surface, the signage and the safety furniture are the parks authority's, added to make the place reachable; its description of the route names no reconstruction of the cisterns themselves. This is access rather than restoration.

The trail is open in every season, but it closes on rainy days and in the days after them because of the flood risk, and on days of extreme heat load. The closure has a certain symmetry to it: the floods that shut the path are the floods the whole system was cut to catch.

• About 200 m, about 30 minutes there and back
• Starts at the foot of the ramp, Masada West, from the Arad side
• Two cisterns, a Roman-period bridge, channel remains and original plaster
• Closed on rainy days, after rain, and in extreme heat

The southern water cistern is the one most visitors actually enter, and it is a different thing from the twelve on the slope. It sits on the plateau, at the far end from the cable car, and it is a large storage chamber with a flight of 64 steps running to its floor. The wall beside the steps carries an inscription that the parks authority describes as a remnant of a youth movement's visit to Masada in 1941.

That inscription is a small piece of the mountain's modern history left inside a piece of its ancient one. The youth movement ascents of the 1940s, led by Shmarya Guttman, are what turned Masada into a national symbol and what eventually produced the first Israeli excavation. Somebody on one of those climbs went down 64 steps into the dark with something sharp.

The plateau cisterns were the delivery end of the system rather than the bulk of it. The parks authority is explicit that further impressive cisterns exist on the summit and on its eastern flank, but that most of the water was stored in the slope array. The chambers on top held what had been carried up, which is to say what could be moved by animal in a day.

The cisterns were among the first things anyone recognised on the mountain. American scholars identified Masada itself through a telescope from Ein Gedi in 1838; ten years later, in 1848, American naval officers reached the site and identified the cisterns. Encyclopaedia Judaica credits Sandel with discovering the water system in 1905, and records that S. Guttman and A. Alon studied Herod's water system in 1953.

That 1953 season is the one the parks authority treats as the turning point. The first Israeli excavation at Masada, which Guttman drove, identified the water supply system, established the full route of the Snake Path and correctly identified the Northern Palace as Herod's palace. The water system was not an afterthought of that dig; it was one of its three results.

One inconsistency is worth flagging, because a reader comparing pages will hit it. The parks authority's page for the western approach calls these the northern cisterns and places them on the northern slope of Masada. Its page for the cisterns trail places the same system of twelve cisterns on the western slope. Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the upper row's passage ending at a gate just south of the Northern Palace and the lower row's leading to the Snake Path, which puts the array around the north-western corner of the rock. The descriptions are of one system; the labels have simply not been reconciled.