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The end of the Hasmonean state, and the advent of the Romans as rulers of Judaea, led to the eventual rise of Herod I as king of the Jews, a position he maintained from 37 to 4 BCE as a steadfast ally of Rome. A Life of Herod was composed in Greek by the prolific philosopher, scholar, and historian Nicolaus of Damascus (born around 64 BCE): now lost, it is widely believed that this Life was the major source for the account of Herod’s reign set out by the Jewish priest-historian Josephus in his Antiquities books 15–17 (Wacholder 1962). It is also clear that Josephus mined the very extensive writings of Nicolaus to find information on the Jews in Hasmonean and earlier periods as well. Josephus himself is celebrated for his account of the First Jewish War against Rome (66–73 CE), which he published around 75 CE, and for his Anqtiquities of the Jews (published around 95 CE), which tells the story of Israel in 20 books from the creation of the world until the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, using as sources the books of the Hebrew Bible, and non-canonical Jewish texts like Maccabees. Josephus’s works, therefore, cover the whole of Herod’s reign, the fortunes of Herod’s family, and the rule of the Roman governors in Palestine until the outbreak of war, relying on sources no longer available to us. Although not conspicuous for his loyalty to his own people during the war of 66–70, and sometimes presenting events in which he was directly involved in a less than dispassionate manner, Josephus is the only writer to have left us a connected narrative of the history of the Jewish people from pre-Hasmonean times to the fall of the Temple. He wrote in Greek, and was thus able to command a non-Jewish readership which preserved his writing for posterity. Of all the Jewish sources noted in this essay, he is undoubtedly the best known, and certainly the most widely investigated as a source for historical material (Feldman and Hata 1989; Hadas-Lebel 1993; Rajak 2002; Mason 2003a; Sievers and Lembi 2005; see also ssss1).