Sicarii.

They carried a sica — a short curved blade, small enough to go under a cloak and not be seen. First-century Judaea, under Roman occupation.

They worked the festivals, when Jerusalem was full. In close, one strike, then back into the crowd — shouting with everyone else, helping to look for the man who did it. Josephus wrote that they “slew men in the daytime, and in the midst of the city.”

Nobody paid them. That part matters. They were not hired — they had decided.

Historians call them the first organised political assassins in recorded history. Some go further and call them the first terrorists. Take that how you like. This site is named for the word, not the work.

What they never did

They never wrote a word of it down.

Everything anyone knows about the Sicarii comes from one man — Flavius Josephus, who fought Rome, changed sides, and then wrote the only surviving account of the people he had left behind. He called them robbers. There is no second source. Nobody who was actually there left a line.

Two thousand years, and the whole of their story is what an enemy said about them afterwards.

That is the entire reason this place exists.

Write it down yourself, or somebody else writes it for you — and you will not be there to argue.