An Israeli anthropologist is using modern forensics and an obscure Biblical passage to challenge the accepted wisdom about mysterious human remains found at Masada, the desert fortress famous as the scene of a mass suicide nearly 2,000 years ago.
A new research paper published on Friday takes another look at the remains of three people found in a bathhouse at the site -- two male skeletons and a full head of women's hair, including two braids.
They were long thought to have belonged to a family of Zealots, the fanatic Jewish rebels said to have killed themselves rather than fall into Roman slavery in the spring of 73 AD, a story that became an important part of Israel's national mythology.
Along with other bodies found at Masada, the three were recognized as Jewish heroes by the Israeli government in 1969 and given a state burial, complete with Israeli soldiers carrying flag-draped coffins.
But Israel might have mistakenly bestowed that posthumous honor on three Romans, said a paper in this month's issue of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology by anthropologist Joe Zias and forensics specialist Azriel Gorski.
The remains of the three became a key part of the site's story when Masada was excavated in the 1960s. Yigael Yadin, the renowned Israeli archeologist in charge of the dig, thought they illustrated the historical account of Zealot men killing their wives and children and then themselves before the Roman legionnaires breached Masada's defenses.
Upon finding the remains, the crew "relived the final and most tragic moments of the drama at Masada," Yadin wrote in his book documenting the dig, mentioning that the woman's "dark hair, beautifully plaited, looked as if it had just been freshly coiffeured."
"There could be no doubt," Yadin wrote, "that what our eyes beheld were the remains of some of the defenders of Masada."
The new paper focuses on the hair, noting the odd absence of a skeleton to go with it. The researchers' new forensic analysis showed an even stranger fact -- the hair had been cut off the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive.
The new findings could not be reconciled with the original identification of the remains.
Zias' attempt to explain the discrepancy led him to the Old Testament's Book of Deuteronomy, where a passage requires that foreign women captured in battle by Jews cut off all their hair, in an attempt to make them less attractive to their captors.
Zias said that the hair belonged not to a Jewish woman but to a foreign woman who fell captive in the hands of Jewish fighters.
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