The Western Palace

The palace stands along the centre of the western casemate wall, near the main gate that faced Judaea and Jerusalem, which is the practical reason for its position: this was the side goods and people arrived on. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry describes it as a self-sufficient unit of four wings, an official wing that Stiebel calls 'the core', a storeroom wing, a service wing and an administrative wing. The Jewish Virtual Library text names the same four as an elaborate royal apartment, a service and workshop section, storerooms and an administrative unit.

The official wing was built around a large central court. A large reception hall opened off it and led into the room Yadin interpreted as the throne room. The parks authority's own description of the plateau adds the details a visitor meets first: benches were built into the entrance room, and the walls carried stucco decoration. On the southern side of the courtyard, according to the foreign ministry text, a large room had two Ionic columns holding the roof over a wide opening onto the court, with walls in moulded panels of white stucco.

The wing was not only ceremonial. Stiebel records service rooms alongside it, and bathrooms with tubs, a stepped cold-water pool and other installations, all of them paved with mosaic. The parks authority notes a staircase running up to a second storey, from which the bathhouse and its mosaic floor can be seen.

• Official wing, or 'the core': courtyard, reception hall, throne room
• Storeroom wing
• Service and workshop wing
• Administrative wing
• Bathrooms with tubs and a stepped cold pool, all paved with mosaic

Herod ruled Judaea from 37 to 4 BCE, and the parks authority's own site brochure, written by Guy Stiebel with Ehud Netzer as content consultant, describes Masada as both a refuge against his enemies and a winter palace. Netzer showed that the building work on the mountain went in three chronological phases, and the Western Palace appears in two of them.

In the first phase Herod built three small palaces, the core of the Western Palace, a building on the upper terrace of the Northern Palace, soldiers' barracks and three columbaria, all of them arranged around a central courtyard. In the second phase came the Northern Palace complex with its public storerooms and large bathhouse, the water system, and the expansion of the Western Palace. The third phase was the casemate wall that closed the perimeter of the plateau. So the Western Palace was among the first things built here and one of the few he came back to.

The stone tells a similar story of stages and imports. Walls were built from local dolomite, quarried on top of the mountain and out of the huge water cisterns. The more elaborate architectural pieces, the column drums, the capitals, the parts of the architrave, were shaped from a softer stone brought in from elsewhere. Mason's marks in Hebrew letters are visible on all the column drums, which is how the origin of the stonecutters is known.

Whether anything here predates Herod is unsettled. Josephus credits the first fortress on the rock to 'Jonathan the High Priest', and Hasmonean coins have come out of the excavations, but the parks authority's brochure states plainly that no architectural remains at Masada can be dated with certainty to the Hasmonean period.

The famous detail is small and easy to walk over. In the floor of a ground-floor room off the reception hall are four depressions in the plaster. Yadin read them as the sockets for the legs of a canopied throne, which is the whole basis for calling the room a throne room. The parks authority prints the reading with its hedge intact, describing the chamber as 'presumably' the throne room, and the foreign ministry text says only that the room 'may have been' Herod's throne room and the seat of authority when he was in residence. Nobody has produced a throne.

The mosaics are the other reason to stop. Stiebel describes a richly coloured pavement in the hall with circles and border ornaments of plant and geometric design. The foreign ministry account describes the largest room's floor as floral and geometric patterns held inside several concentric square bands, and puts several more coloured mosaic floors in the rooms on the eastern side. Between them the two descriptions list circles, plants and geometry and no human or animal figure at all.

One find here has no parallel elsewhere on the mountain: a charcoal drawing of the mosaic, a working sketch of the pattern, was found on a plastered wall nearby. It is the closest thing Masada has produced to a builder's plan, and it belongs to this room.

• Four depressions in the plastered floor, read by Yadin as a throne's feet
• A coloured mosaic of circles with plant and geometric borders
• Concentric square bands framing the largest room's floor
• More coloured mosaic floors in the rooms on the eastern side
• A charcoal sketch of the mosaic design on a nearby plastered wall

There is a real disagreement behind the signage. Yadin attributed ceremonial functions to the Western Palace. Netzer, who dug at Masada in 1989 and again from 1995 and who advised on the parks authority's own brochure, rejected that and assigned the ceremonial role to the Northern Palace instead. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry records the dispute without settling it, and the foreign ministry text quietly keeps both readings by calling the building the fortress's administration centre and the king's ceremonial palace in the same sentence.

The ancient evidence does not help as much as it should. Josephus gives one description of Herod's palace on the rock, and it points two ways at once: 'he built a palace therein, at the western ascent. It was within, and beneath the walls of the citadel: but inclined to its north side.' The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry reads that passage as the Northern Palace, on the strength of the three tiers Josephus goes on to describe. The sentence still begins at the western ascent, which is where this building stands.

What is not in dispute is the scale of what the Western Palace did. Whether or not Herod received anyone formally here, the storerooms, the workshops and the administrative wing were the machinery that kept a palace-fortress running in a desert with no spring.

When the Sicarii took Masada in 66 CE they did not move into Herod's palaces. Stiebel's account is that the rebels lived in the rooms of the casemate wall and in shacks built against it, and used the Herodian palaces as command posts and public buildings, stripping their decorative architecture for building material and furniture. The Western Palace was given a prominent place in that arrangement.

The largest storeroom at Masada is in this building. When it was excavated, lines of vessels were found still in place, each line marked by an ostracon declaring whether that line was ritually pure or impure. Next to the storeroom stood the community's central bakery: a domed oven three metres across with a grinding post on each side of its door, capable of turning out hundreds of loaves. Distribution appears to have been centralised in the courtyard beside it, where many bread receipts were found, ostraca recording that on a given day a stated number of loaves went to a named man at the head of an extended family or group. Every name on them is male.

Two smithies were also working inside the palace, forging iron trilobate arrowheads. That detail matters for what happened next. Jodi Magness, who has excavated at Masada, notes that the overwhelming majority of arrowheads recovered from the site come from two places, the lower terrace of the Northern Palace and the workshop in the Western Palace, and that both were sealed under collapse from fires. Everywhere else, the Romans appear to have swept the mountain clean of usable iron after the siege. The Western Palace kept its arrowheads because it burned on top of them.

• The biggest storeroom on Masada, its vessel lines tagged pure or impure
• A domed oven three metres across, with two grinding posts
• Bread receipts naming the head of each family or group
• Two smithies forging iron trilobate arrowheads
• Burnt collapse, which is why the arrowheads survived the Roman clean-up

Almost everything visible was uncovered in one go. Yadin's Hebrew University expedition excavated the mountaintop between 1963 and 1965, assisted by thousands of volunteers from around the world, and Britannica records that the palaces, storehouses, defence works and Roman siege works were all revealed and cleared. The parks authority's brochure adds the part that shapes what a visitor sees: during those excavations many buildings were conserved and reconstructed, the site was prepared for visitors, and the national park opened in 1966. Conservation and restoration work has been carried out by the parks authority since.

The parks authority does not publish a wall-by-wall breakdown of that work on its site pages, so a visitor who wants to know which courses are Herodian and which are 1960s consolidation is not going to find the answer printed at the building. Treat standing height as restored unless a sign says otherwise, and treat the floors as the honest survivals: the mosaic pavements, the plastered surfaces and the four depressions are what was found, not what was rebuilt.

Painted plaster is the fragile case. Frescoes uncovered by Yadin elsewhere on the summit were exposed to the weather, had to be lifted from the site for preservation, and spent almost twenty years in storage; the set from the commander's residence was returned to Masada in 2014 after restoration led by Maurizio Tagliapietra of the University of Verona. The stucco panels and painted surfaces described in the older accounts of the Western Palace should be read with that in mind.

Excavation here is also not finished. Netzer returned for a short season in 1989, and Hebrew University work resumed in 1995 as part of a development project funded through the tourism ministry, with seasons led by Netzer and Guy Stiebel on the plateau and a season by Gideon Foerster at Roman Camp F and the siege ramp.