Word: yadin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aided by this raw manpower-which included a violin maker, elephant and horse trainers, models, doctors and a midwifery expert-the expedition leader, Israeli Archaeologist Yigael Yadin, was able to complete 97% of Masada's excavation. Small portions of the fortress were left untouched to provide visitors with a before-and-after view of the site...
...Archaeologist Yadin, who is also a former Israeli Army Chief of Staff, was even more impressed by the parchment scrolls unearthed by his expedition. A portion of a scroll identical with one of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments enabled researchers to trace the origin of both documents to the first half of the 1st century. Says Yadin: "It conclusively disproves the views of some scholars who hold that the Dead Sea Scrolls are either not genuine or date only from medieval times...
Perhaps the most dramatic discovery was made by a group of volunteers who unearthed eleven small, mysterious potsherds. Each was inscribed in Hebrew with a different name, one of which was that of Eleazar Ben Ya'ir, the leader of the Zealots. "Could it be," asks Yadin, "that we had discovered evidence associated with the death of the very last group of Masada's defenders?" The answer, he feels, is suggested by Josephus' description of the last moments of Masada: They then chose ten men by lot out of them, to slay all the rest . . . and when...
...potsherds, Yadin believes, could well have been used in the final casting of the lots by Ben Ya'ir and his ten commanders, just before the advance guard of the Tenth Legion breached Masada's walls and found all of the defenders dead...
MASADA by Yigael Yadin. 272 pages. Random House. $12.95. A reverent and absorbing account of the archaeological dig at the rock of Masada on the Dead Sea, where, almost 2,000 years ago, 960 Jews died when the Romans breeched the walls of their aerie. Yadin has himself seen battle; he was Israel's Chief of Staff (1948-52) before turning archaeologist. Totally engrossing...