Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)
Romans capture Jerusalem's Upper City on 8 Gorpiaios
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The defenders walked away from three towers that Titus believed Roman siege machinery could never have taken.
Eighteen days of earthworks, then the wall
Josephus dates the final fall of Jerusalem's Upper City to the night leading into the eighth of Gorpiaios, in Vespasian's second regnal year — 70.
The siege banks had taken eighteen days to build and were finished the day before. Battering rams opened the wall, and the defenders abandoned towers that Josephus considered effectively impregnable.
Standards on the towers, fires through the night
Roman troops planted their standards on the captured towers, went into the lanes, killed people they met, looted houses and set buildings alight. The fires burned on through the night.
Titus then ordered armed resisters killed and the rest taken prisoner, though Josephus says soldiers killed elderly and infirm inhabitants too. An officer named Fronto sorted the captives for execution, forced labour, arena spectacles, the triumph or enslavement.
What "8 Gorpiaios" does not settle
Josephus gives the date securely but never says which calendar he means — Macedonian, Julianized Macedonian, or Judaean lunar. Modern conversions include 2, 8, 20 and 26 September.
This was the fall of the Upper City, not the day the Temple burned; Josephus places that earlier, in the month Lous. Nor was Jerusalem the revolt's last stronghold — Herodium, Machaerus and Masada still had to be reduced.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources not yet audited Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 0070-09.
What the sources leave uncertain
- Josephus securely supplies '8 Gorpiaios,' but converting that date is disputed because he does not identify whether he means the Macedonian, Julianized Macedonian, or Judaean lunar calendar.
- Modern conversions include 2 September, 8 September, 20 September, and 26 September. Therefore an exact ISO day is not defensible here.
- Josephus's casualty and captive totals are ancient claims, not securely verified population statistics; modern scholarship commonly considers his 1.1-million siege death toll greatly exaggerated.