Researchers return to Qumran
IN the cliffs high above the Dead Sea, archaeologists chip away with pick axes, hoping to repeat one of the most sensational discoveries of the past 100 years — the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The scrolls were discovered in 1947 by local Bedouin in the area of Qumran, about 20km east of Jerusalem.
They gave insight into Jewish society and religion before and after the time of Jesus and spurred a decade of exploration, before the search fizzled. Recent finds have stirred fresh excitement, however, and archaeologists are probing higher and deeper as hundreds of caves remain unexcavated.
‘‘In the last few years we noticed new pieces of scrolls and parchments arrive on the black market,’’ said Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
‘‘It drove us to return to the caves,’’ he said, sitting at the entrance of a cliffside grotto known to his team as 52B.
Towards the back of 52B is a narrow burrow packed with debris from centuries of wind and flash floods, that when cleared could extend about 10m. Volunteers sift through buckets of dirt.
‘‘People thought there was nothing left to find . . . there just wasn’t incentive to do this,’’ said Randall Price, a professor at Liberty University, in the United States, who helped fund the dig.
But 52B did not appear on previous surveys and could yield precious secrets, Price said.
In the narrow streets of the openair shuk (market) of Jerusalem’s Old City, Eitan
Klein, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, stops by dealers to make sure their goods appear in an official registry and are not being traded on the black market.
Klein is deputy director of the authority’s robbery prevention unit, which in 2016 recovered a fragment of text containing the word ‘‘Jerusalem’’ on a piece of 7thcentury BC papyrus that had been plundered from a cave.
Following the papyrus’ discovery and other intelligence operations, Klein said, ‘‘the assumption is that there are still artefacts inside the caves waiting to be found. The question is, who will discover them?’’
New discoveries could also help solve the debate over who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Raising further possibilities is the Copper Scroll, found in Qumran in 1952. Unlike its companions, which used parchment or papyrus, its list of 64 hiding places for gold and valuables was etched on copper.
Gutfeld said the treasure referred to might be from the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
In 2006 he finished excavating two manmade tunnels not far from Qumran that he believes match a description in the Copper Scroll of the socalled Valley of Shadow.
One of the tunnels, a 2mhigh, shoulderwidth corridor, extended 125m underground. No treasure was found, but Gutfeld promised to continue searching in new spots.
‘‘I’m not a treasure hunter. I’m an archaeologist,’’ he said. But he added: ‘‘We hope to find any hint or relationship to what we know from the text of the Copper Scroll.’’