The revolt that began in Judaea in 66 CE was suppressed over seven years, culminating in Titus's five-month siege of Jerusalem in 70, the burning of the Second Temple and the demolition of most of the city, with the final reduction of Masada in 73. Josephus, the principal source and an eyewitness to much of the war, gives 1,100,000 dead in the siege and 97,000 prisoners taken over the whole conflict, distributed to the arena, the Egyptian mines and provincial slave markets; the temple treasures paraded in Titus's triumph are depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The Roman state converted the annual Temple tax into a poll tax on Jews throughout the empire, the fiscus Judaicus. Josephus's numbers cannot be reconciled with modern estimates of Jerusalem's population and are treated as rhetorical, but the destruction of the temple, the ending of the sacrificial cult, and the enslavement and dispersal of a large part of the Judaean population are not in question. The war did not by itself produce a general exile: Jewish settlement continued in Judaea and especially in Galilee.
Roman armies under Vespasian and Titus suppressed the Judaean revolt, destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple, and enslaved and dispersed large numbers of the population
Broshi's estimate from agricultural carrying capacity and settlement survey puts the population of Roman Palestine at roughly 1 million around 66 CE, of whom the great majority were Jews; other reconstructions run to 2-2.5 million. Josephus' figures - 1.1 million dead and 97,000 enslaved at Jerusalem alone - are regarded by most historians as heavily inflated.
The upper bound of 1,100,000 is Josephus's own figure for the siege of Jerusalem and is rejected by modern historians as incompatible with the size of the city; Tacitus's 600,000 besieged is similarly a literary figure. No defensible lower bound exists, because there is no independent evidence — documentary, demographic or archaeological — from which to reconstruct the toll of the siege and the wider war.
Josephus, a participant and eyewitness, records the famine during the blockade, mass crucifixions outside the walls, the burning of the Temple and the city, and the assignment of captives to the mines and the arena.
Palestine, Italy