 Apart from meaning a stake, the word "stauros" was also used by writers of the early Christian period to refer to a construction with transom.Using the Greek word σταυρός in its verbal form, the Jewish historian Josephus too, writing of the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, recounted that the Jews caught outside the city walls "were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city … the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, "one after one way, and another after another", to the crosses, by way of jest.