Josephus claims 1.1 million dead over the course of the siege; Tacitus gives six hundred thousand. Menahem Stern's standard critical edition of the classical sources treats Tacitus's figure, and by extension Josephus's higher one, as rhetorical rather than reliable, and proposes no replacement. No modern historian has converted demographic or archaeological evidence into a defensible death toll for the siege itself.
What would resolve this A published demographic or archaeological reassessment of the siege's casualties, of the kind Raviv and Ben David produced for the Bar Kokhba War from settlement-survey evidence, applied to first-century Jerusalem's population and the siege's own documented timeline.
OpenRoman-period Judaean history; historical demography; classical source criticismMenahem Stern, Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, Volume Two: From Tacitus to Simplicius (1980)