He regarded the term Zealot as an honourable title, and he withdrew it when he deemed their activities to be terroristic or anti-social. The legitimacy of terrorism when other forms of protest fail was as hotly debated then as it is today, and the precise part played by Zealots and Sicarii, who were active in every violent uprising of the century, is a subject of scholarly speculation.77 Even more controversy surrounds the various millenarian sects of the desert fringe, whom Josephus (as well as Philo and Pliny) grouped together as Essenes. There were, in fact, many different categories. The best known are the Qumran monks, because their Dead Sea monastery was excavated by G. L. Harding and Père de Vaux in 1951-6, and their numerous writings are being fully analysed and published. They lived in tents in summer, and in winter holed up in caves. They had elaborate plumbing arrangements in their central buildings for their ritual lustrations, and we have found their kitchen, bakery, dining-room and pottery shop, as well as a meeting room.
