A splendid human past

Cast your lures with pluck into the thick sediment waters of antiquity and you may get a nibble of birch bark, papyrus, or lime paste. Or, if you're work-week weary, the convenience mart at Nova has a refrigerated case of mankind's great classical manuscripts, with photos, marked down from 6 am to 10 am for the holidays.

Dead Sea Scrolls
Israel
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd exploring caves near Qumran, a ruin on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel, discovered a collection of jars containing seven parchment scrolls. The shepherd took the scrolls to a Bethlehem antiques dealer, hoping to make a profit. The dealer bought the scrolls and sold them to the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, who collected religious manuscripts on behalf of his church. Within a year of the original find, scholars around the world had heard about the scrolls and flocked to Jerusalem to examine them. When they realized the importance of the collection, they launched an extensive search for more scrolls in the caves surrounding the original find.

Archeologists worked on the Qumran site, which includes 11 caves, until 1956, when the last finds were uncovered there. The parchment scrolls they found, 870 in total, vary in degree of preservation. Some are nearly complete, while only fragments remain of others. Interpreting the scrolls was a painstakingly slow process. Over 40 years passed before scholars made the scrolls' contents available to the public through publications and exhibitions around the world.