Archaeologists find cave that once held Dead Sea Scrolls

In the late 1940s, young Bedouin goatherds discovered a cave in the Judean Desert, bored like the path of a giant termite into the hillside.

Within the cave the teenagers found something puzzling: ancient jars in rows. The jars held the first of the parchments that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scrolls’ discovery kicked off a search that lasted for nearly a decade. By 1956, archaeologists and Bedouin explorers reported finding 11 such caverns, all to the northwest of the Dead Sea near the region of Qumran.

On Wednesday, Israeli and U.S. archaeologists announced they had found compelling evidence for a 12th Dead Sea Scroll cave.

Mostly written in Hebrew, though a few were in Aramaic and Greek, the scrolls’ text dated back roughly 2,000 years.

Best estimates suggest that the authors inscribed their words at various points between the early 1st century BC and 70 AD, known as the Second Temple Period. A postage-sized scrap of the scrolls — and most were found in such small fractures — can fetch a huge sum at auction.

But scholars of antiquity would argue that the information held within the scrolls, the psalms and religious texts from 2,000 years ago, is priceless.

These scrolls, which include sections of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest known version of the Ten Commandments, have been hailed as one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.

The search still continues, decades later. “It is the first time 60 years we have the first evidence of a new scroll cave,” Oren Gutfeld, a researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology, told the Washington Post by phone Thursday morning. “We knew about 11 caves, and now we have 12.”

The cave had been mapped as part of a cursory survey in 1992. But the new evidence comes from a more thorough excavation.