Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than experts thought, according to an artificial intelligence (AI) analysis.

Consisting of about 1,000 ancient manuscripts etched onto animal skin, papyrus and copper, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the earliest known versions of texts from the Hebrew Bible — including copies of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy — and date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

Now, scientists have used an AI program, dubbed Enoch, to analyze the handwriting patterns on the scrolls, revealing that they may be older than experts thought. The study authors say their findings, published June 4 in the journal PLOS One, are a significant step in dating some of the earliest versions of the Bible. However, not all experts are convinced.

"With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible," lead study author Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors."

Discovered by Bedouin shepherds inside the West Bank's caves of Qumran from 1946 to 1947, the ancient manuscripts range from legal documents and calendars to sections of the Hebrew Bible and psalms, written mostly in Hebrew but also in Aramaic and Greek.

Previous dating of the scrolls relied on paleography — the study of ancient writing systems — with some undergoing radiocarbon dating in the 1990s. However, castor oil had been applied to some of the manuscripts in modern times to improve their legibility. This oil is also a contaminant that can disrupt radiocarbon dating, so the results from these techniques remain a topic of debate.

Related: Ancient 'curse tablet' may show earliest Hebrew name of God

In an attempt to clear things up, the researchers first cleaned 30 samples from different manuscripts to remove the castor oil, before successfully radiocarbon-dating 27 of them. They found that two of these scroll fragments were younger than past analyses suggested but that other fragments were older.

Then, the scientists set about creating their Enoch AI model. Enoch was trained on the handwriting of 24 of the newly dated manuscripts and their radiocarbon dates. After verifying the model with 13 further selected images from the same manuscripts, the researchers presented it with 135 undated manuscripts. They found that it agreed with the estimates made by scholars 79% of the time.

Yet the results for the remaining 21% of the scrolls point to a mystery, with Enoch giving them a range of dates that could make them older, hard to determine, or even a century younger than initial estimates.

They also suggest that two different writing styles, known as the Hasmonean and Herodian scripts (named after the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty and Herod, the Roman client king, respectively), could have overlapped for longer than previously thought.

Nonetheless, Enoch also corroborates earlier paleography, notably for a scroll titled 4Q114, which contains three chapters from the Book of Daniel. Analysts initially estimated 4Q114's writing to have been inked during the height of the Maccabee uprising in 165 B.C. (a part of the Hanukkah story) due to its description of Antiochus IV's desecration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The AI model's estimate also falls within this range, between 230 B.C. and 160 B.C.

But for some paleographers, the results are hardly surprising.

"The results of this study are very interesting, and presumably important, but not Earth-shattering," Christopher Rollston,a professor and chair of biblical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at The George Washington University, told Live Science in an email. "Most of the conclusions of this article also dovetail with what the great palaeographers in the field, such as the late Frank Moore Cross, had already stated more than 60 years ago."

Rollston also criticized the notion that the new tool could enable researchers to "study the hands that wrote the Bible" as "at the very least, gross hyperbole." No manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible date to the First Temple period (circa 1200 to 586 B.C.), when it was originally composed, or to the early parts of the Second Temple period (538 B.C. to A.D. 70), he said.

He noted that AI can be useful, but it should only be one of many techniques used to study ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"Enoch could and should never be the only tool in the toolbox of someone wishing to determine the date for the writing of a manuscript. After all, human handwriting, and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features, is a deeply human thing," Rollston added. "Machines can be helpful in isolating features of a script, but the presence of a gifted palaeographer is at least as valuable as a machine-learning tool."

Researchers have finally deciphered a 1,900-year-old scroll describing a tense court case during the Roman occupation of Israel. The finding reveals more about criminal cases from the time and answers a longstanding question about slave ownership in the region.

In 2014, a researcher organizing papyri in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority's storeroom made a surprising discovery: the longest Greek papyrus ever found in the Judaean desert.

The document had been classified as written in Nabataean, an ancient Arabic dialect. "When I saw it marked 'Nabataean,' I exclaimed, 'It's Greek to me!", papyrus expert Hannah Cotton of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said in a translated statement released Jan. 28.

Over the following decade, Cotton assembled a team of experts to decipher the 133-line text, which details legal proceedings when the region was a province in the Roman Empire. Her team's work on the document was published Jan. 20 in the journal Tyche.

The researchers found that the papyrus contained a set of notes that a prosecutor may have used to prepare for a trial in front of Roman officials during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117 to 138) and before the Bar Kokhba revolt began in A.D. 132 — a major Jewish uprising against the Roman Empire.

"This is the best-documented Roman court case from Judaea apart from the trial of Jesus," study co-author Avner Ecker, an epigrapher, or researcher of ancient inscriptions, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the statement.

Related: 1,700-year-old oil lamp found in Jerusalem shows a rare Jewish menorah, even though the Romans tried to suppress the religion

The court case referenced in the papyrus text centered on two people — Gadalias and Saulos — who forged documents related to selling and freeing slaves to get around paying Roman taxes.

"Forgery and tax fraud carried severe penalties under Roman law, including hard labor or even capital punishment," study co-author Anna Dolganov, a papyrus expert at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said in the statement.

According to the study, the document also contained a hastily jotted transcript of the trial and notes from one prosecutor to another discussing strategy.

But significant parts of the papyrus are missing, thwarting the researchers' efforts to fully understand the meaning of the text, the researchers said in the study. Missing details include where the trial took place, where the defendants lived and whether they were Roman citizens.

However, the newly translated papyrus does provide evidence for a much-debated question: whether or not ancient Jewish people owned slaves. The papyrus says that at least one Jewish family — that of Saulos and his father — owned multiple slaves, according to the study, but it is unclear if those slaves were themselves Jewish.

The document doesn't give a clear resolution to the court case, which may have been interrupted by the Bar Kokhba rebellion, according to the study. The rebellion may have caused the scroll's owner to hastily discard it in the caves of the Judaean desert, where it sat for nearly two millennia with other Dead Sea Scrolls.

There are a number of archaeological finds and stories we might hear about in 2022. These include discoveries from Egypt's "lost golden city," new finds from Qumran — the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in nearby caves — as well as finds that may shed light on what life was like 11,000 years ago, when humans started building large ceremonial sites. In this countdown, Live Science makes five archaeology predictions for 2022.

New finds from Egypt's 'lost golden city'

In 2021 archaeologists announced the discovery of a "lost golden city" near Luxor in Egypt called the "Rise of Aten". The discovery generated headlines around the world, but archaeologists have excavated just a small portion of it. According to historical records, the pharaoh Amenhotep III (reign 1391-1353 B.C.) had three palaces in the city. In 2022 we can expect to hear of more discoveries from this city that may include these or other royal palaces. Any new discoveries could shine a light on some historical mysteries, such as why Amenhotep III's son, Akhenaten, tried to focus Egypt's religion around the worship of the Aten, the sun disk, rather than ancient Egypt's traditional pantheon of gods. 

Read more: 3,000-year-old 'Lost Golden City' discovered in Egypt

Dig where you live

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on and the omicron variant spreads, travel restrictions are coming back into effect and some governments are implementing lockdowns. Additionally, inflation is raising prices, making it more expensive to travel and buy equipment — particularly electronics. Funding for archaeology may also become scarce in 2022 as governments and universities cut back grants to meet their own expenses. 

These health and economic challenges will likely mean that many overseas archaeological expeditions are cancelled or scaled back, and that much of the work carried out in 2022 will likely be done by archaeologists working within their own country. Even archaeologists digging within their own country may choose to dig at sites close to where they live so that they can avoid travel and hotel costs. 

"Dig where you live" may become an increasingly popular trend in the field. Those who can't do this may have to settle for analyzing data sent in from archaeologists who can. 

Excavations at Karahantepe

Excavations at Karahantepe in Turkey are giving us new insights into what life was like in this part of the world around 11,000 years ago. So far archaeologists have found a complex where people likely marched past phallus-shaped pillars and a carved human head. It's a big site, however, and excavations are ongoing, so we can expect more discoveries about the site and the people who built it in 2022. 

Karahantepe is located not far from Gobekli Tepe, a massive ceremonial complex that also dates back around 11,000 years. It seems likely that those who used the Karahantepe complex were also involved with Gobekli Tepe. But who were they? How many ceremonial sites did they build? Did they also build large administrative buildings or houses? In 2022 we may discover clues to help us answer these questions. 

Afghanistan looting and decisions

The Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, hurtling the country into an economic crisis. Governments around the world suspended aid to Afghanistan's government, curtailing its ability to do even the most basic things like purchase food. With economic desperation growing, there is a good chance that looting will also increase as people struggle to feed themselves and their families. 

Stolen antiquities from Afghanistan will likely appear in the United States and other countries, forcing governments to make some tough choices. Do they return stolen artifacts to the Taliban-ruled government — knowing that in the past the Taliban has destroyed antiquities? Or do they hold artifacts in storage somewhere or even direct law-enforcement agencies to ignore stolen artifacts from Afghanistan? In 2021, government agencies such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection didn't respond to questions from Live Science about what to do with these artifacts, but in 2022 they will probably have to make a decision.

News from Qumran

Archaeologists digging near the site of Qumran in the West Bank — where the Dead Sea Scrolls were buried in nearby caves — hope to be busy in 2022. They plan to excavate a previously unexplored cave and continue investigating a series of tunnels near Qumran. The team's previous digs have unearthed some fascinating remains, including a 12th cave that once held Dead Sea Scrolls (unfortunately only one remains), and we may hear of new discoveries from the site in 2022 as the excavations continue. 

Originally published on Live Science.

An ancient Hebrew document created more than 1,000 years ago and stashed away in Cairo may unlock a secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Scholars of the scrolls have long wondered why so many fragments of the mysterious manuscripts — more than 15,000 pieces of more than 900 original documents — were hidden in caves around Qumran, in the hills of the Judean Desert just west of the Dead Sea in Israel, seemingly far from any major settlements.

The nearby archaeological site of Qumran itself also presents similar mysteries. For instance, why was its pantry so well-stocked, with more than a thousand pottery storage vessels and hundreds of bowls, plates and cups — but excavations show very few people ever lived there? What was the purpose of a large open-air terrace called the "southern esplanade" in Qumran, and why is it walled off from a nearby cemetery? And why were Qumran's many ritual baths, or "miqva'ot,"so large? 

Related: Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A glimpse of the past 

Now, research suggests Qumran was in fact the site of a huge annual ceremony of the mystical Jewish sect of the Essenes, in which its members gathered from cities and rural communities all over Israel to observe a key ritual known as the Covenant of Renewal. Qumran's peculiar construction, the researchers suggest, reflects this ceremonial function. Fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls also mention a festival that seems to be referring to the same gathering of the Essenes, the researcher said.

According to the new theory, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves could have been written by Essene communities throughout the country and brought to Qumran at the time of the annual festival to study and be stored there.

"The countrywide gathering in Sivan [the third month of the Jewish calendar, which falls inMay or June] was a large and well-regulated event for which clear and detailed rules were established,"Daniel Vainstub, an archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told Live Science. "All this fits the archaeological remains of the site."

Dead Sea gathering

In a new study, published online at the end of July in the journal Religions, Vainstub argues that Qumran was the location of this annual gathering based on a version of the rules of the religious community contained in what's called the Damascus Document or Damascus Covenant.

The Damascus Document — so-named from its numerous references to the city in Syria, possibly because Damascus was once ruled by Israel's King David — was copied from an earlier Hebrew source in about the 10th century A.D. It was eventually stored in the Cairo Genizah, a storeroom adjoining a Jewish synagogue in Fustat, the original Arabic capital of Egypt that eventually became a southern neighborhood of the city of Cairo.

Destroying any text that contains God's name is forbidden in Jewish religious law, even accidently, and any documents from Cairo's Jewish community were ultimately stored in the genizah just in case, at least until they could be formally buried. 

Related: Photos: Rare inscription from King David's time

As a result, writings accumulated over many centuries in the Cairo Genizah; and in the 1890s, Cambridge University scholar Solomon Schechter visited the site and found a a trove of hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts, including Hebrew religious texts, as well as works in several languages on art, literature, philosophy and science.

The most complete versions of the Damascus Document were found in the genizah, and fragments of it have since been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves.

And according to Vainstub, the version from the genizah in Cairo contains a fuller description of a ceremony referred to in the Dead Sea scroll fragments, which was misunderstood until now. The Cairo Geniza description suggests Qumran was the site of an annual gathering in the month of Sivan, when the holiday of Shavuot is observed to mark the renewal of the Jewish covenant with God.

"I argue that the Damascus Document contains the bylaw or rule that regulates the annual gathering," Vainstub told Live Science in an email. "No one noticed this before me."

Qumran mysteries

The passage in question in the Damascus Document refers to the Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — and reads: "And all [the inhabitants] of the camps shall assemble in the third month and curse anyone who deviates either to the right [or to the left from the] Torah."

Vainstub suggests the "camps" were Essene religious groups scattered throughout Israel, often as isolated rural communities but also within major cities. He argues the passage shows that a gathering took place at a specific time, and that people from different places were called to convene in one site.

Previously discovered archaeological evidence suggests the ancient complex at Qumran would have supported relatively few members of the sect for most of the year, but the new text suggests it swelled to host several hundred people at the time of the annual gathering.

"Some dozens of permanent residents of Qumran … had to host many hundreds of people at the site once a year in ever-increasing numbers," Vainstub wrote in the study. "The site of Qumran, with its facilities, caves and surfaces, accords with the evidence for the annual gathering that emerges from the scrolls."

The pilgrims who stayed at Qumran only for a few days did not need to be regularly housed, Vainstub wrote; instead, they may have slept in the open or in one of the many caves in the area — such as the caves where the first fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. 

Vainstub's proposal explains why the public buildings at Qumran, such as its pantry filled with crockery and storage vessels, were large enough to serve thousands of people, but no evidence of them has ever been found. He argues that the adjoining southern esplanade was an outside eating area that had to be walled off from the nearby cemetery to maintain religious purity; and his theory also explains the large size of the numerous ritual baths at the site, which were an essential part of Jewish worship at that time. 

The idea that the Essenes gathered at Qumran once a year might also explain the location of the scrolls, as the sect members may have left their religious writings there in the caves that they slept in, Vainstub wrote. "My theory is also consistent with the fact that the scrolls did not necessarily originate from Qumran, but rather were brought to the caves from all over the country and left in the caves over the decades."

Originally published on Live Science.

A famous Dead Sea Scroll manuscript was written by not just one but two scribes, according to a new study that used artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics to detect subtle differences in handwriting on the ancient document.

The two scribes wrote in such a similar manner that the differences between the two aren't visible to the naked eye, the analysis revealed — a detail that suggests the scribes might have received similar training, perhaps at a school or in a close social setting, the researchers wrote in the study. 

"This is just the first step," study principal investigator Mladen Popović, a professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told Live Science in an email. "We have opened the door to the microlevel of individual scribes; this will open new possibilities to study all the scribes behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and put us in a new and potentially better position to understand with what kind of collection, or collections of manuscripts we're dealing [with] here."

Related: Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A glimpse of the past 

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in the late 1940s, when a young shepherd looking for a stray goat found several manuscripts in a cave in Qumran, in the West Bank. Over the next decade, researchers and local Bedouins found more than 900 manuscripts in 11 caves. These manuscripts are the oldest remaining texts of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. But it's unclear who or even how many people wrote them, because the scribes didn't sign their names, the researchers of the new study said. 

That hasn't stopped biblical scholars from guessing how many scribes were involved in penning the various Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. "They would try to find a 'smoking gun' in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter which would identify a scribe,' Popović, who is also the director of the University of Groningen's Qumran Institute, said in a statement. But these "smoking gun" analyses were often subjective and, as a result, hotly debated, he said.

So, Popović and his colleagues used another approach — AI and statistics — to investigate the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the seven scrolls originally found by the Bedouin shepherd. This well-preserved scroll, which dates to about 125 B.C., is lengthy — it measures 24 feet (7.3 meters) long and 10 inches (26 centimeters) high — and contains 54 columns of Hebrew text. One spot, in particular, caught Popović's eye; between columns 27 and 28, there is a small break in the text and a new "page," where two sheets have been sewn together. Other researchers had already debated whether this scroll was written by one or two scribes, and Popović's team wanted to see if they could solve the mystery. 

In effect, the team wanted to determine "whether subtle differences in writing should be regarded as normal variations in the handwriting of one scribe or as similar scripts of two different scribes," they wrote in the study. 

The researchers' methods detected "subtle and nuanced differences in [the] handwriting that we cannot [discern] with the human eye only," Popović told Live Science. The discovery that two scribes collaborated on the Great Isaiah Scroll reveals that ancient scribes "worked in teams," he said. And, unlike the "smoking gun" analyses, this research "is not just a conjecture, but based on evidence now," Popović added.

Related: The 25 most mysterious archaeological finds on Earth

How they did it

When designing the algorithm, the researchers had to train it to differentiate the text, or the ink, from the background — the animal skin or papyrus. This distinction, known as binarization, was designed by study co-researcher Maruf Dhali, a doctoral student in the artificial intelligence department at the University of Groningen, who created an artificial neural network that could be trained using deep learning. This neural network recorded the original ink traces on the manuscript, even when these ancient letters were transformed into digital images. 

"This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person's muscle movement and are person-specific," study senior researcher Lambert Schomaker, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen, said in the statement.

The neural network analysis revealed that the 54 columns of text in the Great Isaiah Scroll fell into two distinct groups, which had a transition about halfway through the manuscript. Dhali told Schomaker that there might be more than one writer, so Schomaker did a separate analysis but got the same result. In this second analysis, Schomaker looked at fraglets, or parts of the letters that "can be more precise, distinctive and informative in finding significant shape differences than the full characters," the researchers wrote in the study.

To be extra cautious, the team added checks and controls to the text. “When we added extra noise to the data, the result didn't change," Schomaker said. "We also succeeded in demonstrating that the second scribe shows more variation within his writing than the first, although their writing is very similar."

Next, the team performed a visual analysis by creating "heat maps." These maps incorporated all of the variants of a given letter, such as the Hebrew letter aleph (א), found in the scroll. Then, they made an average version of the letter from the first 27 columns and another from the last 27 columns. After that, they compared these averaged letters, and found that they could easily spot differences between the two. Moreover, the differences were statistically significant, Popović said.

Popović and his colleagues plan to investigate other scrolls, which may reveal different origins or training for different scribes, he said. These analyses may also shed light on the communities that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Understanding the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls makes it possible to better understand what I call the cultural evolution of the Hebrew Bible," Popović told Live Science.

The new research "is the first time that automatic procedure was applied to identify the transition of style in the Great Isaiah Scroll," Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, a researcher in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Tel-Aviv University who specializes in biblical-era handwriting analyses, told Live Science in an email. Faigenbaum-Golovin was not involved in the study. "The method used in this study handles well the challenges rais[ed] by the poor state of preservation of the scroll via robust binarization." 

The study was published online Wednesday (April 21) in the journal PLOS One.

Originally published on Live Science.

Fragments of a biblical scroll dating back 1,900 years have been discovered in the "Cave of Horror" in the Judean Desert in Israel.  

The cave's existence has been known for some time; it gets its macabre name from 40 ancient human skeletons that were discovered there in the 1960s. The skeletons are of people who starved to death during the Bar Kokhba revolt, which occurred between A.D. 132 and A.D.135, when the Jewish people in the region revolted against the Roman Empire. The revolt was crushed, with some ancient writers claiming that over 500,000 Jews were killed and many others deported from the region. 

Related: In photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls revealed

The newly found biblical scroll, which is written in Greek, also dates to the Bar Kokhba revolt and contains passages from the books of Zechariah and Nahum, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said in a statement released Tuesday (March 16). In the Hebrew Bible these are part of one book of 12 minor prophets.

"These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to one another, render true and perfect justice in your gates. And do not contrive evil against one another, and do not love perjury, because all those are things that I hate — declares the Lord" (Zechariah 8:16–17), part of the scroll reads in translation. The IAA said that this is the first time in 60 years that a biblical scroll has been found in scientific archaeological excavations, as opposed to scrolls being looted or otherwise excavated unscientifically. 

Some media outlets are declaring the find to be a new "Dead Sea Scroll," which is a name that refers to thousands of fragments from about 900 texts found in caves near the site of Qumran in the West Bank beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the Cave of Horror is not near Qumran and the IAA referred to the latest find as a new "biblical scroll" instead of a Dead Sea Scroll. 

Since 2017, the IAA has been conducting a campaign to find new scrolls in caves in the Judean Desert. Looting is a major problem in the region, and the authority is concerned that some scrolls are being pilfered by thieves before archaeologists can find them. As part of the campaign, the authority is re-excavating caves that have been previously excavated by archaeologists. 

"The newly discovered scroll fragments are a wakeup call to the state. Resources must be allocated for the completion of this historically important operation. We must ensure that we recover all the data that has not yet been discovered in the caves, before the robbers do," Israel Hasson, director of the IAA, said in the statement. 

In addition to the biblical scroll, archaeologists found a 6,000-year-old mummified child inside the same cave. The mummified child, likely the remains of a girl who died between the ages of 6 and 12, was buried in a shallow pit, according to an analysis from a CT (computed tomography) scan of the skeleton. Additionally a cache of coins were found in the same cave that are stamped with images of Jewish symbols, including a harp and a date palm. They also date to the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt. 

Additionally a basket that dates back around 10,500 years was found in a separate cave. The IAA says that it appears to be the oldest complete basket in the world. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are made up of tens of thousands of manuscript fragments — mostly made of parchment, or animal skin. Now, scientists are analyzing tiny traces of ancient DNA in these fragments to piece together the story of the early text.

In the 1940s, the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back 2,000 years, were found in a cave near the archeological site of Qumran in the West Bank, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, Live Science previously reported. Since then, fragments of the scrolls have been found scattered across 11 caves near Qumran and a couple of other sites in the Judean desert. Still others have been found in the collection of antiques dealers.

Archaeologists currently have more than 25,000 of these fragments, which once made up a series of 1,000 ancient manuscripts. The scrolls include early copies of the Hebrew Bible, calendars, astronomical text and community rules, and even contained information on the location of buried treasure, Live Science previously reported. Since researchers first discovered these fragments, they have been trying to piece them together to understand the full story of the scrolls.

Related: In photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls revealed

In the past, scientists primarily did this by trying to fit the pieces together like a puzzle, according to a statement. But because most of the fragments are made of parchment (a sliver of them are made from other materials such as papyrus), researchers decided to piece them together using an invisible marker: the ancient DNA from the animals they're made of. 

In the 1990s, researchers demonstrated that they could take little bits of ancient animal DNA from the scrolls and amplify them in the lab using a method called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). But this research was done before full animal genomes were known, before the invention of deep-sequencing technologies and before the scientific community learned how to deal with ancient DNA to avoid contamination, said senior author Oded Rechavi, a molecule biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. 

Now, with deep-sequencing technology — technology that reveals the specific sequence of four chemical building blocks which make up an organism's DNA — readily available, it's possible to create a "fingerprint" for the creatures whose animal skins made up the scrolls 

For the new study, Rechavi and his team spent years analyzing ancient DNA from 26 different fragments. 

But "we can't just take a fragment and grind it," Rechavi told Live Science. To obtain a sample of DNA without damaging the scrolls, researchers scraped off a bit of "scroll dust" from the uninscribed side of the fragments. Using PCR, they amplified this DNA to detectable levels and then ran it through the DNA sequencing machines.

They found that these samples contained both modern DNA — left by modern humans handling the scrolls — and fragmented ancient DNA from animals. They then compared these short sequences with the genomes of 10 animal species and found that most of these fragments were made from sheep skin.

"It's amazing that enough DNA can be extracted from the 2000-year-old scrolls," Rechavi said in an email. "They are not only old and contaminated, they have also been processed (to make parchment) which is very damaging to the DNA."

Those don't go together

But just as the pieces are hard to put together because they're fragmented, so is the DNA. "Since the DNA is fragmented and contaminated, it's typically very difficult" to tell whether the DNA belongs to one sheep versus another, Rechavi said. "We have to use multiple different and complementary analyses to confidently say whether two pieces belong together or not."

Related: Cracking Codices: 10 of the Most Mysterious Ancient Manuscripts

In some cases, it's more clear than in others, he added. They discovered that two fragments from the scrolls containing the text of the prophetic book of Jeremiah were made of cowhide. Before these findings, one of these fragments was previously thought to fit together with another from the book of Jeremiah made of sheepskin.

The fact that it would be difficult to raise cows in the Judean desert and the text found on these pieces were very different, likely means the cow fragments were processed elsewhere and then brought to the Qumran caves, according to the researchers.

"We can't tell exactly where the foreign scrolls originated, but we can tell, owing to the DNA analyses, that it was somewhere outside the Judean desert," Rechavi said. That likely means that Jews were "open" to reading different versions of the same biblical book that were circulating at the time, he said. That also likely means that they "cared more about the interpretation of the text than the exact wording."

They also discovered that some of the fragments thought to come from the Qumran caves might have come from elsewhere. For example, copies of a non-biblical text called the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice were important in understanding the history and thinking at the time. The new analysis revealed that copies found in the Qumran caves are genetically distinct (came from different sheep) from those found at the site of Masada. It was unclear if these scrolls were taken to Masada by people after the fall of Qumran in 68 C.E. or if it was drafted elsewhere and the work was popular in a larger area than the Qumran, according to the study.

These distinct genetic patterns suggest that the culture and thought processes of Qumran may have been more widespread than previously thought. "This is very important because most of what we know about the period in this area … is deduced by what was found in Qumran, and we didn't know before whether the culture of the Qumran sect represents the culture in other places" across ancient Judea, Rechavi said.

Now, the team hopes to study ancient DNA in even more of the scrolls — at least the ones that they can sample. "There are 25,000 fragments and we could only sample a few," Rechavi said. "There's plenty of work to do still."

The findings were published today (June 2) in the journal Cell. 

• Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A glimpse of the past
• In photos: Dead Sea Scrolls in America
• Photos: The ancient ruins of Shivta in southern Israel

Originally published on Live Science.

Four Dead Sea Scroll fragments, previously thought to be blank, are anything but: Detailed imaging has revealed that these ancient pieces of parchment contain letters, sewn thread, ruled lines and even a discernible word, new research finds.

The finding almost went unnoticed, until Joan Taylor, a professor of Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College London, took a magnifying glass to these fragments and noticed that there was a "lamed," the Hebrew letter for "L," written on one of them.

At the time, Taylor said she thought that she "might be imagining things. But then it seemed maybe other fragments could have very faded letters too," she said in a statement.

Related: In photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls revealed

Taylor's hunch paid off. One of the four fragments had four lines of text, with a total of 15 to 16 completely or partially preserved letters. One word, "Shabbat," the Hebrew word for "Sabbath," is clearly visible, and this clue, as well as several other letters, suggest that this fragment might be from the biblical book of Ezekiel (46:1-3).

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of more than 900 manuscripts written by an ancient Jewish sect known as the Essenes. Since the scrolls' discovery in the Qumran caves of the West Bank in 1946, scholars have pored over the texts, which include versions of the Hebrew Bible, calendars, astronomical observations and community rules. 

Although some parchments touted as Dead Sea Scrolls are forgeries, the fragments studied in this experiment are the real deal, according to a news statement from The University of Manchester in England. These fragments were discovered during the official excavations of the Qumran caves, and were never channeled through the antiquities market. 

In the 1950s, the Jordanian government gifted some of the fragments to Ronald Reed, a leather and parchment expert at the University of Leeds in England, so he could examine their physical and chemical composition. At the time, it was thought that these fragments were blank and could be used for scientific tests. After Reed and his student, John Poole, studied the fragments, they stored them safely away. 

This collection was then donated to The University of Manchester in 1997, but received little attention, until now, when Taylor spied the Hebrew letter. To see if any of the other fragments had text, she photographed all the pieces in the collection that were over 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) long — 51 in total — that appeared blank to the naked eye.

Taylor didn't use regular photography. Instead, she relied on multispectral imaging, a technique that uses various wavelengths, such as infrared, on the electromagnetic spectrum to capture images of hard-to-see figures, such as the carbon-based ink on the scrolls. In the end, she and her colleagues found that some fragments had ruled lines or vestiges of letters, but only four fragments had Hebrew or Aramaic text.

One of those pieces was from the sewed edge of a parchment scroll, and had a few letters on it, according to the statement. 

"With new techniques for revealing ancient texts now available, I felt we had to know if these letters could be exposed," Taylor said. "There are only a few on each fragment, but they are like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you find under a sofa."

This isn't the only time that supposedly blank pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been found to contain text. In 2018, another group announced that infrared imaging had revealed Hebrew letters and words on several of the scroll fragments, Live Science previously reported. 

The new project is part of the Network for the Study of Dispersed Qumran Cave Artefacts and Archival Sources (DQCAAS). The results will be published in a forthcoming report. 

• Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A glimpse of the past
• In photos: Dead Sea Scrolls in America
• Photos: The ancient ruins of Shivta in southern Israel

Originally published on Live Science.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a marvel. Buried for roughly 2,000 years under piles of debris and bat guano in a chain of caves in the Judean desert, the collection of nearly 1,000 fragmented manuscripts includes biblical texts, ancient calendars and early astronomical observations.

Among these mysterious artifacts (many of which are now just ragged scraps of parchment) one impeccably preserved document stands out. The Temple Scroll, named for its description of a Jewish temple that was never built, is one of the longest (it stretches 25 feet, or 8 meters, long), thinnest and easiest scrolls to read. 

Why, out of thousands of faded fragments found in the Judean caves, has the Temple Scroll fared so well after two millennia? In a new study published today (Sept. 5) in the journal Science Advances, researchers attempted to find out by scrutinizing a piece of the parchment using every X-ray and spectroscopic tool at their disposal. They found that the scroll did indeed have something its ancient siblings did not — traces of a salty mineral solution not present in any other previously studied scroll, nor in any of the caves or in the Dead Sea itself. 

Related: Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past

According to the researchers, the presence of these minerals shows that the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced using an impressive variety of techniques — and, more importantly, the find could also inform the way these scrolls are preserved in the future.

"Understanding the properties of these minerals is particularly critical for the development of suitable conservation methods for the preservation of these invaluable historical documents," the researchers wrote in the study.

Prior studies revealed that the Temple Scroll was unlike most other Dead Sea fragments, in that it was composed of several distinct layers: an organic layer, made of the animal skin that served as the parchment's base; and an inorganic layer of minerals that may have been rubbed on during a parchment "finishing" process. While all of the Dead Sea Scrolls boil down to animal skins — usually taken from cows, goats or sheep before being scraped clean and stretched on a rack — few showed evidence of finishing, the researchers wrote.

To figure out what this inorganic layer was made of, and whether it was rubbed there intentionally, the team studied a fragment of the Temple Scroll using X-ray scans and Raman spectroscopy — a technique that reveals the chemical composition of a substance by watching how laser light scatters off various chemical elements. They found that the scroll was coated in a mixture of salts made from sulfur, sodium, calcium and other elements. However, these salts did not match elements found naturally on the cave floor or in the Dead Sea, ruling out a natural origin.

The Temple Scroll, the authors concluded, must have been finished in an unusual way that was not used on any other known Dead Sea Scrolls. It's possible that this salt coating has contributed to the Temple Scroll's uniquely well-preserved appearance, the team wrote — but, meanwhile, it could also be an ingredient in the scroll's eventual destruction. Because the salts detected on the scroll are known to suck moisture out of the air, their presence could "accelerate [the scroll's] degradation" if not stored properly, the authors said.  

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Originally published on Live Science.

Biblical ruins

Biblical sites draw interest from many people: archaeologists, historians, priests, rabbis, imams and many members of the general public. Sadly, these historical ruins from the time of Jesus also often attract looters, people who illegally excavate a site, often in hopes of selling what they find. War, poverty and demand from artifact collectors, who are sometimes willing to pay large sums for biblical artifacts, help drive the looting. Here, Live Science takes a look at seven biblically important archaeological sites that have been plundered by modern-day looters.

Caves near Qumran

Inside 12 caves at Qumran, archaeologists discovered the now-famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which consist of fragments from 900 manuscripts that include some of the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible. Shortly after the first few scrolls were discovered, in 1947, looters began cleaning out those caves. In fact, looters, not archaeologists, found many of the scrolls. A lot of these scrolls were sold through an antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin (also known as "Kando") in Bethlehem.

In 2017, a Dead Sea Scroll was found in another Qumran cave, though there was no writing on it. The cave had been looted, with archaeologists finding the remains of what appear to be modern-day pickaxes. Looters have also plundered other caves found since that time, and archaeologists have launched a campaign to find and excavate any caves near Qumran that contain archaeological remains.

Nineveh

Nineveh, an ancient Assyrian city located in what is now Iraq, appears numerous times in the Bible. For instance, the Book of Nahum records a prophecy, supposedly given by a man named Nahum, which predicted the destruction of Nineveh. This came to be in 612 B.C., when army made up of troops from Medes (a kingdom in modern-day Iran) and Babylon attacked the city.

Sadly, the past decade has not been kind to Nineveh. In June 2014, the terrorist group ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh) captured Nineveh and occupied it until January 2017. During that time, the terrorist group destroyed the tomb of Jonah, a holy site for both Muslims and Christians. Looters dug a system of tunnels beneath the remains of the destroyed tomb. It's unclear exactly how many artifacts thieves looted from beneath the tomb. After Nineveh was retaken by Iraqi troops, the remains of inscriptions were found within the tunnels.

Dura-Europos

Dura-Europos, an ancient city in southeastern Syria, is home to the earliest known Christian church, dating to A.D. 230. The church has a courtyard, meeting hall and baptistery (a place used for baptisms). The baptistery displays a number of wall paintings of Christian scenes, including one depicting Jesus walking on water.

The Syrian civil war has hit this site hard. Analysis of satellite photos taken between 2011 and 2014 reveals that the site was "subjected to extremely heavy looting," a report published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science found. The terrorist group ISIS captured Dura-Europos in 2014. The Syrian army recaptured the area in December 2017. At present, it's not certain how much of the city and its early Christian church remains.

One consolation is that over 12,000 artifacts from Dura-Europos are at the Yale University Art Gallery in the United States. These items were excavated in the 1920s and 1930s by an archaeological team from Yale and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters.

Bethlehem

Located in the West Bank, Bethlehem is famous as the biblical birthplace of Jesus; archaeological remains show that Bethlehem and nearby areas have been inhabited for thousands of years. One recently discovered necropolis holds tombs that date back more than 4,000 years, although looting or construction had destroyed part of the necropolis.

Quite a bit of looting has damaged the area's ancient tombs and archaeological sites. The looting is aggravated by unemployment, poverty and the limited resources of Palestine's antiquities service. Palestinian archaeologists have noted that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict worsens the situation, bringing poor security, higher poverty rates, and the damage or destruction of archaeological sites.

One study, published in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, found that some looters in the Bethlehem area, in their desperation to find artifacts to sell, have even turned to spirit possession in hopes of finding golden artifacts.

Al-Yahudu

When the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II forced a community of Jews out of Judah, they relocated in Al-Yahudu (a name that can be translated to "village of the Jews" or "town of the Jews"). That site is located someplace in what is now Iraq.

The settlement is known from the Hebrew Bible, which describes how, after Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., the first temple was destroyed and much of the Jewish population was forcibly relocated to Mesopotamia. (Most of Iraq is within the boundaries of the historical region called Mesopotamia.)

Tablets from Al-Yahudu have been appearing on the antiquities market over the past 20 years. The tablets describe the lives of some of the people who were forcibly exiled, showing how they retained their Jewish religion and customs while adapting to life within the Babylonian Empire. Despite the importance of Al-Yahudu, archaeologists do not know where the site is within Iraq, although looters do. At present, more than 200 tablets from Al-Yahudu are known to exist. When archaeologists do find the location of this ancient settlement, they will likely find that it has been heavily looted.

Nimrud

The Book of Genesis tells how the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud (known in the Hebrew Bible as "Calah") was built by a "mighty warrior" and "mighty hunter" named Nimrod. Genesis also claims that Nimrod was the great-grandson of Noah. Famously, of course, Noah followed God's command and built an ark to house his own family as well as male and female pairs of every animal on Earth, protecting them from a great flood that God created.

Modern-day looting and destruction have devastated Nimrud. The city was looted during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and artifacts from the city that were in the National Museum of Iraq, in Baghdad, were also taken. In June 2014, ISIS captured Nimrud, destroyed much of the ancient city and may also have looted some of it. The city was retaken in November 2016 by Iraqi troops; for more than a month, there was little security at the site, however, and media reports indicate that more looting took place.

Tyre

The ancient city of Tyre, located in what is now Lebanon, is mentioned numerous times in the Bible. For instance, a king of Tyre name Hiram sent cedar wood and skilled workers to King David and King Solomon, the Hebrew Bible says. These resources and laborers helped build the first temple, the holiest site in Judaism. The Hebrew Bible also describes how Solomon and Hiram collaborated to create fleets of ships that conducted trade in the eastern Mediterranean and trade with an unknown land called "Ophir" that was rich in gold.

Tyre has fallen victim to looting over the last 50 years. Wars and poor economic conditions have hit Lebanon periodically over that time, creating conditions that have permitted large-scale looting.

For example, in 1989, a stone sarcophagus at Tyre "was blown up so that broken sculpture chunks could be carried to the marketplace," wrote Helga Seeden, an archaeology professor at the American University of Beirut, in a paper published in the book "The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education" (Routledge, 1994).

Then, in 1990, looters discovered and pillaged a cemetery, possibly used for the burial of children. "According to local information, some 200 stone stelae together with several dozens of cinerary urns and other typical Iron Age pottery vessels were unearthed," wrote Hélène Sader, an archaeology professor at the American University of Beirut, in an article published in the journal Berytus Archaeological Studies in 1991.

Archaeologists have discovered two caves near Qumran, in the West Bank, that may hold Dead Sea Scrolls.

So far, the archaeologists excavating the caves have yet to find the remains of any biblical-era manuscripts. However, both caves, now called 53b and 53c, are near caves that held the already-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, and the team is not done investigating the sites.   

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of the remains of 900 manuscripts found in 12 caves located near Qumran. Many scholars believe that a group called the Essenes lived at Qumran and wrote many of the Dead Sea Scrolls before abandoning the site around A.D. 70, when a revolt against the Romans started.

Caves 1 through 11 were discovered between 1946 and 1956; most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in these 11 caves. The 12th cavewas discovered in 2017 but has divulged just one, blank scroll. Inside the cave, archaeologists also found the remains of items used to store scrolls —  jars, textiles, rope and string. This indicates that more scrolls existed in Cave 12 in the past but were looted some time ago. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

The two newfound caves are near the 12th cave, and they also hold evidence of having contained scrolls in the past.

Evidence for scrolls

While looters plundered cave 53b sometime in the past, archaeologists found a bronze cooking pot and "large amounts of pottery representing store jars, flasks, cups and cooking pots, and [the researchers also found] fragments of woven textiles, braided ropes and string," archaeologists Randall Price, of Liberty University in Virginia, and Oren Gutfeld, of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in the abstract of a paper they presented recently at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting, held in Denver Nov. 14-17. Additionally, an oil lamp was found at the entrance to the cave, they said.

"We have not analyzed all of the pottery from this cave [53b], so we do not know if a scroll jar was present," Price, a professor of divinity at Liberty University in Virginia, told Live Science. The textiles, rope and string found in 53b are similar to those found in cave 12, he said. This means that cave 53b may also have been used to store scrolls.

The bronze cooking pot found in cave 53b dates to sometime between 100 B.C. and 15 B.C., a time when people were living at Qumran. The design of the lamp is similar to those of lamps found at Qumran, Price said, suggesting that the people who lived at Qumran used the cave.

Inside cave 53c, the researchers found a fragment of a scroll jar, providing evidence that scrolls were once stored in that cave. Excavations are underway in cave 53c to determine if it still holds any scrolls.

Gutfeld is a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Originally published on Live Science.

At least five of the 16 "Dead Sea Scroll" fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes, an independent study has concluded.

The Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington, D.C., last year, had been under scrutiny for publishing and displaying the texts despite their murky origins. The museum sent five of its alleged Dead Sea Scroll fragments to Germany's Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin for an investigation that included X-ray scanning and ink analysis.

The museum announced today (Oct. 22) that those five fragments "show characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin"; in other words, they are not 2,000-year-old texts, but instead more-recent forgeries. The scroll fragments will no longer be displayed, the museum said.

The real Dead Sea Scrolls represent the earliest surviving pieces of the Bible's Old Testament. The hundreds of original scrolls were found in the mid-20th century in the Qumran caves in the West Bank of Israel. In the last two decades, more fragments have emerged on the antiquities market, prompting some suspicion about where they came from. [7 Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed]

Several of those newly surfaced fragments were purchased by the funders of the Museum of the Bible, the Green family, which owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain. Scholars who spoke to Live Science last year had criticized the museum for publishing descriptions of the fragments in 2016 without fully investigating the origins of the texts. Some researchers raised concern that several fragments looked like fakes.

"My studies to date have managed to confirm upon a preponderance of different streams of evidence the high probability that at least seven fragments in the museum's Dead Sea Scrolls collection are modern forgeries, but conclusions on the status of the remaining fragments are still forthcoming," Kipp Davis, a scholar at Trinity Western University in Canada, said in today's press release from the museum.

Davis had been involved in the museum's initial 2016 publication of the scroll fragments, but later wrote about his questions concerning the authenticity of some of the texts.

The five "Dead Sea Scroll" fragments that had been on display have been replaced with three other fragments "pending further scientific analysis and scholarly research," the museum said in the statement. "Exhibit labels will continue to inform guests that there have been questions raised about the authenticity of these fragments and that further research will be conducted."

This is not the first controversy over the sources of the museum's collection. Last year, Hobby Lobby was ordered to pay a $3 million forfeiture and to hand over thousands of artifacts after illegally importing cuneiform tablets, clay stamp seals and other ancient Mesopotamian items from Iraq.

Original article on Live Science.

Previously hidden text on fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls is now readable, revealing a possible undiscovered scroll and solving a debate about the sacred Temple Scroll. The discoveries came from a new infrared analysis of the artifacts, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced yesterday (May 1).

The newfound writing came from the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, which are in the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), and the Book of Jubilees, a text written at the same time as the Hebrew Bible that was never incorporated into the biblical books, the archaeologists said.

Researchers presented the newly revealed words at an international conference, called "The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seventy: Clear a Path in the Wilderness," in Israel. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

Local Bedouins and archaeologists discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s in caves near Qumran in the West Bank, located near the northern edge of the Dead Sea. Excavations in the following decades turned up tens of thousands of parchment and papyrus fragments that were dated to 2,000 years ago, the IAA said. 

There were so many small and fragile fragments that archaeologists placed them in boxes to be studied at a later date. Now, that time has come: IAA researchers are digitizing the scrolls so that they can be studied and shared with the public without damaging the originals.

During one of these digital scans, Oren Ableman, a scroll researcher at the IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls Unit and a doctoral student in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noticed something peculiar on a few dozen fragments that had been discovered in Cave 11 near Qumran.

These fragments looked blank to the naked eye. But, by using infrared imaging, Ableman discovered that they held Hebrew letters and words, he said in a statement. Ableman then deciphered the script and even connected the fragments to the manuscripts that they had likely been attached to before crumbling away.

Some of the more interesting fragments include the following:

• A fragment from the Temple Scroll, a text that gives instructions for how to conduct services in the ideal temple. Scholars have debated whether there are two or three copies of the Temple Scroll from Cave 11. The discovery of the text on this fragment suggests that there are, indeed, three copies. 
• A fragment from the Great Psalms Scroll. This fragment contains part of the beginning of Psalm 147:1, and the end of the verse is preserved in a larger fragment from the same cave. The newfound fragment shows that the ancient Psalm is slightly shorter than the Hebrew text used nowadays.
• Another fragment has letters written in paleo-Hebrew, an ancient Hebrew script. This fragment could not be attributed to any known manuscripts and could belong to an unknown manuscript.

Original article on Live Science.

Scholars have deciphered a Dead Sea Scroll written in a Hebrew code, finding that it contains part of a 364-day calendar of holy days.

The calendar notes the day of Sabbaths, the start of seasons and the days of festivals and feasts. The scribe, who went to the trouble of writing the scroll in code, forgot to include the Day of Atonement (known as Yom Kippur) on the calendar; but another scribe, who apparently understood the code, inserted that day onto the calendar.

The scroll, made out of leather, also contains a short note explaining that the Offerings of Wood festival should be held over six days, with two trees being offered to god on each of those days. [See Images of the Dead Sea Scrolls]

Scholars still aren't sure why this scroll, along with a few other Dead Sea Scrolls, were written in code.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 12 caves near the site of Qumran in the West Bank. They consist of thousands of fragments from over 900 manuscripts. Many scholars believe that a sect called the Essenes who lived at Qumran wrote many of the scrolls. The scrolls contain numerous texts from the Hebrew Bible as well as calendars, astronomical observations and rules for how community members should live, among other types of texts.

Most of the fragments came from 11 caves found between 1947 and 1956. Archaeologists found an additional cavein 2017, though it had been robbed in the mid-20th century and only one blank scroll was found inside. The newly deciphered scroll is from what archaeologists call "cave four," which was discovered by the Bedouin people in 1952. Until now, this Dead Sea Scroll was one of only a few scrolls that had not been fully deciphered and described in the scientific literature, researchers said.

Jigsaw puzzle

The surviving portion of the calendar is not only written in code but is now also in 62 tiny pieces. The decipherment "presented outstanding difficulties and required extraordinary efforts, much like assembling a jigsaw puzzle," wrote postdoctoral fellow Eshbal Ratzon and professor Jonathan Ben-Dov, both at the University of Haifa, in a paper recently published in the Journal of Biblical Literature.

"The fragments vary in size from 3.9 cm × 2.8 cm [1.5 by 1.1 inches] for the largest fragment to many small fragments not larger than 1.5 cm × 1.5 cm [0.6 by 0.6 inches]," Ratzon and Ben-Dov wrote in the journal article.

The code that is used "is a simple replacement code, with each letter represented by a designated sign," Ratzon and Ben-Dov wrote. "Some of these signs correspond to paleo-Hebrew or Greek letters, while others seem arbitrary." Paleo-Hebrew is a form of Hebrew writing that was no longer widely used at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were written around 2,000 years ago.

Why was it coded?

Just a few Dead Sea Scrolls were encrypted, and most of those were written using the same code used in the newly deciphered scroll.

Strangely, this calendar, along with the other coded Dead Sea Scrolls, are texts that were well known in the Qumran community — such as "The Rule of the Congregation" and "Phases of the Moon" — if not elsewhere in Israel, and don't seem to include any secrets or hidden wisdom, researchers say.

"The general aim of encryption in Qumran is not entirely clear," Ratzon and Ben-Dov wrote. "It generally seems that encryption was a means of conveying prestige to the initiated but not a means of 100-percent security or preventing comprehension by other community members."

The scientists are studying this newly deciphered scroll and others to better understand why a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls were coded.

Original article on Live Science.

Archaeologists are excavating a newfound cave in Qumran, with the hope of finding new Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 12 caves and date back around 2,000 years and consist of thousands of fragments from more than 900 manuscripts, including numerous copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible. The scrolls were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, but who, exactly, wrote them is a matter of debate among scholars. Many experts believe that members of a Jewish sect called the Essenes wrote the scrolls at Qumran. Eleven of the Dead Sea Scroll caves were discovered between 1947 and 1956 near the newfound cave, in what is now the West Bank, near the shore of the Dead Sea.

In 2017, archaeologists announced the discovery of a 12th cave, though they said the cave had been looted in the mid-20th century. Inside the cave, they discovered only one blank scroll, along with the remains of jars, cloth and a leather strap that would have been used to wrap and store the scrolls, according to the team, led by Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology. [See Images of the Dead Sea Scrolls]

Gutfeld and Randall Price, of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, are now leading an archaeology team that is excavating this newfound cave.

"Dr. Gutfeld and I have been at Qumran since December, working with our team on excavating a new cave in the Qumran area," Price told Live Science in an email. No other details about this "new cave" have been released, but the team will release a statement soon, Price said.

In 2016, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that it is carrying out a program to find and excavate any undiscovered caves in the Judaean Desert. In the past few years, there have been a number of instances in which looters have been caught carrying the remains of scrolls.  

Archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority say it's possible that more scrolls will be found in caves that are yet to be discovered. Scrolls were sometimes hidden in caves, particularly around 70 (after Jerusalem fell to a Roman army) and between A.D. 132 and 136, when there was a failed rebellion against the Roman Empire.  

Original article on Live Science.

The burial of a warrior who lived and (literally) died by the sword, a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings and a cave that may have held Dead Sea Scrolls — these are just some of the big archaeology and history stories that we think we may hear about in 2018. Look back at the predictions for 2017 and 2016 to see our track record.

Fantastic new burial in Greece

The tomb of a warrior who was killed by the slice of a sword has already been discovered in Greece. At least four other people were buried with the warrior. The five people were buried with gold and silver rings, ivory-handled swords, a gold-decorated dagger and many other artifacts.

Yet the public never heard a word about this fantastic discovery because the area where the tomb is located has been hit hard by looters. Archaeologists do not want to disclose information about the tomb until excavations are finished and the site can be better secured.

In 2018, the security situation may improve enough for this discovery to be discussed in more detail. Until then, no pictures have been released, and Live Science decided not to publish the site's location or more information. [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

13th Dead Sea Scrolls cave?

In 2017, a new Dead Sea Scrolls cave was found near the site of Qumran. The cave had been plundered in the 1950s or 1960s, but archaeologists found a blank scroll when they excavated it recently. This is the 12th cave found near Qumran that once held Dead Sea Scrolls. The other 11 caves were discovered in the 1940s and 1950s. [In Photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed]

The discovery of the 12th cave made headlines around the world, but that find is unlikely to be the end of the story. The team that found the 12th cave is surveying several other caves that could potentially hold additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Live Science has learned. This survey is being carried out as part of a larger project by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The IAA is racing to identify and excavate any caves in the Judaean Desert that may contain archaeological remains, because several looters operating in the Judaean Desert have been caught by authorities over the past few years. Some of the looters were found carrying the remains of possible scrolls.

Given that the survey is ongoing and that several potential Dead Sea Scrolls caves have already been identified, it wouldn't be surprising to see in 2018 that a 13th Dead Sea Scroll has been discovered near Qumran.

Prehistoric-site discoveries in Saudi Arabia

2017 brought news of some fantastic prehistoric-site discoveries in Saudi Arabia. In August, Live Science reported that 46 prehistoric sites, some possibly more than 1 million years old, had been discovered in Saudi Arabia. The findings were made by researchers with the Palaeodeserts Project, which aims to better understand Saudi Arabia's human and environmental past.

In October, another archaeological team reported that they had found 400 mysterious rectangular structures that archaeologists call "gates" (named for their resemblance to field gates) in Saudi Arabia, and within a few days, the team was invited to take low-flying aerial photographs and conduct on-the-ground research. Nearly 6,000 aerial photographs and a large amount of data are currently being analyzed. [Photos: Aerial Views of Ancient Stone Structures in Saudi Arabia]

In November 2017, the country held the "1st Saudi Archaeology Convention," in which research from across the kingdom was presented. In 2018, we can expect to hear of new prehistoric-site discoveries, as well as finds from more recent time periods, in Saudi Arabia. 

Valley of the Kings

Much research has been going on in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in recent years, and 2018 may see new discoveries in the valley.

In July, Live Science reported that archaeologists had identified an area near the tomb of the pharaoh Ay (1327-1323 B.C.) that has four foundation deposits and a radar reading that could indicate the presence of a tomb. Another group of archaeologists has carried out surveys of the western part of the Valley of the Kings in recent years. A third team, this one from the University of Basel, in Switzerland, is currently analyzing and publishing the finds from KV 40, a tomb in the Valley of the Kings where dozens of mummies were discovered in 2014.

Additionally, Live Science has received unconfirmed reports of fieldwork going on right now in the Valley of the Kings that may lead to the discovery of a new tomb. Given all of this activity, it's quite possible that 2018 will bring stunning new discoveries, possibly including that of a new tomb, in the Valley of the Kings.

Science versus looters

In 2018, scientists will be working on many technologies and solutions to address the worldwide problem of looting. They include robots that can go into dangerous looter tunnels and assess damage that looters have done, dogs that sniff out artifacts that are being smuggled into the U.S., and software that can identify stolen artwork that thieves are trying to sell.

Countries that are dealing with wars and economic and political strife are hit the hardest by looting. Looters have gunned down antiquities guards, and children have been killed while working (typically for little money) in narrow tunnels.

Originally published on Live Science.

The Museum of the Bible finally opened its Genesis-inscribed doors Friday (Nov. 17) in Washington, D.C. But questions still linger over the authenticity of some of its star artifacts: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The private museum is supporting research into the manuscripts to find out whether they are legitimate, 2,000-year-old scraps of the ancient Hebrew Bible or modern forgeries.

The original Dead Sea Scrolls, which make up the earliest surviving pieces of the Old Testament, were found between 1947 and 1956 in the Qumran caves of the Judean Desert. Many of the texts were sold to archaeologists through a local antiquities dealer, Khalil Iskander Shahin, who went by the name "Kando."(This was a time before a 1970 UNESCO convention made it illegal to dig up and sell such cultural artifacts.)

Since 2002, about 70 more fragments billed as Dead Sea Scrolls have been acquired by private collections, many of them sold by Kando's son, who was in charge of his father's estate. [In Photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed]

Thirteen of these fragments were acquired by Steve Green, president of the arts and craft chain Hobby Lobby, and the man behind the $500-million Museum of the Bible. Green has been building a collection of Bible-related antiquities, many of which he has donated to the museum, since 2009.

Some scholars who watch the antiquities market were alarmed by the fast pace of Green's early collecting —and they were not surprised when, over the past summer, Hobby Lobby was ordered to pay the U.S. government $3 million and forfeit thousands of cuneiform tablets, clay stamp seals and other artifacts suspected to be smuggled from Iraq, they told Live Science. The company, in its defense, claimed in a statement at the time it was new to the collecting world, and its representatives "did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process," which "resulted in some regrettable mistakes."

But did those early mistakes include the purchase of forgeries, too?

New scrolls come to market

In 2016, the museum published details of its Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the book volume "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection" (Brill, 2016) for the first time. In a separate volume that same year, Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen published his collection of Dead Sea Scroll fragments, too. Soon after, some experts more loudly voiced their suspicions that several of the newly surfaced scrolls could be modern forgeries.

"For one thing, the sudden emergence of so many 'new' Dead Sea Scrolls on the market in the past few years —of which the Museum of the Bible owns only a relatively small percentage —should be suspicious right off the bat," Bible scholars Joel Baden and Candida Moss told Live Science in an email. (Baden and Moss recently wrote "Bible Nation," a book critical of the Green family's various religious projects.) "As no archaeological excavations are uncovering new scrolls, there's no reason that there should be a surge in availability all of a sudden —unless they are being manufactured." [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

Most of the new fragments have not been definitively linked to the Qumran caves. It is unknown where the texts originated before they entered the antiquities market, and "the careful study of the authenticity of the Museum of the Bible's scrolls was carried out after, not before, they went ahead with the publication of the scholarly edition of the fragments," Baden and Moss added.

"The spread of forgeries is closely connected with the lack of awareness on how important is to go in depth with researching the provenance," said papyrologist Roberta Mazza, a research fellow at the University of Manchester. Mazza used the example of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, a piece of papyrus suggesting Jesus was married that caused a sensation when it was unveiled in 2012. "The moment someone researched [its] provenance properly, it became clear it was a forgery," Mazza said in an email.

Kipp Davis, a scholar at Trinity Western University in Canada, was involved in the museum's 2016 publication of the scroll fragments, and has continued to research the manuscripts' authenticity. Davis wrote a paper in September in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries outlining some of the problems with the scroll fragments in the Museum of the Bible and in the Schøyen Collection.

The manuscripts found at Qumran contain a diverse mix of texts, including calendars and community rules unrelated to the Bible. But the newly surfaced fragments contain texts that are already known, mostly from the Bible, Davis said.

"It's especially odd that there's virtually no fragments in any of the private collections that come from a text that we did not know before," Davis told Live Science. "One would think that out of upwards of 70 fragments circulating all over the world, you would expect at least one or at least two fragments of text of something we have not seen before."

And Davis noted that there were inconsistencies with the way letters were shaped and spaced in the fragments. 

"There were lines of text that would appear to follow the damage of the fragment as opposed to what would occur naturally," Davis said. "There would be a letter that would be crammed into the corner of a fragment." He ultimately identified six of the 13 fragments that he believes are fake.

Michael Langlois, who studies ancient writing at the University of Strasbourg in France, had assessed and identified possible forgeries in the Schøyen Collection, and was less generous in his opinion of the Museum of the Bible's fragments.

"It's almost as though I could recognize the hand of the forger," Langlois told Live Science. He believes all the scroll fragments published by the museum in 2016 are modern fakes.

An investigation in progress

Museum officials, however, are not yet ready to make a judgment.

"Our labeling of these items will clearly state that there's a discussion about the authenticity," David Trobisch, the director of collections at the Museum of the Bible, told Live Science in an interview before the opening. [7 Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed]

Christopher Rollston, a biblical scholar at George Washington University who got a preview of the museum, told NBC News that the display of Dead Sea Scrolls indeed states they may be forgeries and that research into the matter is ongoing.

The text fragments had been sent to forgery experts in Berlin for further testing this fall, Trobisch said. The results of that analysis are still pending, but he said he expects to make an announcement by the end of the year about their findings.

Trobisch himself was not won over by the paleographic, or handwriting, arguments against the manuscripts' authenticity.

"I can show you hundreds of manuscripts where the letters change all the time by the same scribe," he said. "You have more variety."

Trobisch said the best way to answer these questions will be to deeply research the origin of the manuscripts, though he added that he didn't suspect the Kando family of being involved in a forgery scheme.

"If this is a forgery, it's probably one of my colleagues," Trobischadded, referring to the high level of knowledge it would take to create authentic-looking Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

As for why anyone would create such forgeries, money would be an obvious motive. "People have been forging Dead Sea Scrolls since before the real Dead Sea Scrolls were even discovered," said Michael Press of the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. Press noted the case of antiquities dealer Moses Shapira who tried selling a supposed ancient copy of Deuteronomy, which he claimed had been found near the Dead Sea. Shapira tried to sell the strips of text to the British Museum for 1 million pounds in 1883. After the scroll fragments were declared forgeries, Shapira committed suicide.

Davis wrote that the Museum of the Bible and the Schøyen Collection have not disclosed how much their Dead Sea Scroll fragments were purchased for, but Azusa Pacific University paid $1.38 million for five similar Dead Sea Scroll fragments in 2009.

Biblical interpretations

Beyond the questions over authenticity and collecting ethics, some scholars had also been worried that the Green family's evangelical Christian faith could distort the museum's portrayal of the Bible.

Hobby Lobby famously won a Supreme Court case fighting the Affordable Care Act mandate that employers provide health insurance that covers contraceptives. The company argued this requirement contradicted its religious views.

And Steve Green "in the past has made it very clear that he wants to use the museum as a proselytizing device to make more Christians," Robert Cargill, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Iowa, told Live Science. "When you've got a mission like that, it's not good science, it's not critical method, it's an evangelical tool."

But in recent years, Green has backed off that stance. "It is not for me to push my agenda," Green told NBC News. "It is our role to just present the facts of this book and let the visitor decide." The Associated Press, in its assessment of the museum, reported that the exhibits avoided interpreting the Bible and did not delve into issues like evolution and marriage.

Cargill had toured the exhibits in the museum while they were still under construction, not as a paid consultant, but as a critic. And he saw signs the museum staff had been listening to its detractors.

As he wrote on his blog, Cargill thought it was "remarkable" that the museum will feature a replica of the Gilgamesh Flood Tablet. This text details a Mesopotamian flood story, older than, and very similar to, the biblical flood story. The display encourages visitors to decide for themselves if they think the story of the flood in the Bible was influenced by other ancient narratives, Cargill wrote. [In Photos: Treasures of Mesopotamia]

"[The museum] may have been established as an evangelical device, but there's been a shift in direction," he told Live Science. "They're moving toward a more critical, objective presentation of the material."

Original article on Live Science.

Twenty-eight fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls that were purchased from the antiquities market have yet to be published, but are now sitting in three U.S. institutions, Live Science has found.

Forthcoming publications will describe some of these fragments within the next year, experts said. The 28 "new" fragments are part of a growing number of Dead Sea Scrolls that have appeared in the United States. At least 45 fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls have popped up in the U.S. over the past two decades.

Scholars have questioned whether some of these fragments are modern-day forgeries or if they come from caves in the Judean desert that were looted in the past few decades.

Often, anonymous individuals sold these fragments that have appeared in the U.S., claiming that they were once owned by Khalil Iskander Shahin, an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, Live Science found. Shahin collected many of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Bedouin people in the 1940s, '50s and '60s; he often went by the name Kando, which his son William Kando now uses. [In Photos: Dead Sea Scrolls from the Antiquities Market]

However, William Kando has raised concerns about the number of scroll pieces claimed to have shown up in the United States. In conversations with Live Science, he said that while his family has sold some scroll fragments to collectors in the United States over the past few decades, the family didn’t sell them in the numbers that some collectors are claiming.

During the conversations with Live Science, William Kando also revealed that, after the Kando family sold scroll fragments to U.S. collectors, these artifacts were often resold multiple times, creating a tangled collecting history that makes it difficult to determine which of the 45 fragments the Kandos actually owned.

Qumran caves

The Dead Sea Scrolls come from 12 caves, which contained thousands of scroll fragments and are located near the site of Qumran in the West Bank. Excavations of the caves by professional archaeologists uncovered some of the scrolls, while private Bedouin residents removed other scrolls, before selling them to Shahin.

The scrolls contain text from books in the Hebrew Bible as well as community rules, calendars and astronomical texts, among other writings.

Eleven of these caves were discovered between 1947 and 1956, and the discovery of a 12th cave was announced earlier this year. Archaeologists found that most of the scrolls in the 12th cave had been plundered decades earlier. More caves that contain (or once contained) scrolls could await discovery, said Randall Price, a professor at Liberty University in Virginia, who was one of the leaders of the team that excavated the 12th cave.

Unpublished scroll fragments

Altogether, there are nine unpublished Dead Sea Scroll fragments at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas; four at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California; and another 15 fragments that were recently sold through a company called Les Enluminures on behalf of an anonymous seller and are now in an undisclosed U.S. institution. Sandra Hindman, the president of Les Enluminures, said that the institution has not yet made a public announcement and she is not at liberty to disclose the identity. [See Photos of Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments] 

As the 28 unpublished scroll fragments are studied and described in scientific journals, more information will appear on what the artifacts contain. Already, multiple scholars who are concerned about the fragments have called for the publication of as much information on their collecting history as possible.

"Southwestern purchased nine Dead Sea Scroll fragments approximately seven years ago. We currently have a contract to publish them with Brill ," a publisher of scholarly books, said Ryan Stokes, a professor of the Old Testament at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Hopefully, the volume will be available in the next year."

When Southwestern purchased the fragments seven years ago, the seminary stated in its news releases that the fragments included writings from the biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Daniel, Psalms and Deuteronomy. According to these past statements, one of the fragments holds passages from Leviticus 18, a biblical passage that forbids incest and homosexuality.

The four unpublished fragments at Azusa Pacific University include writings from the biblical books of Daniel, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and should be published soon.

"We're hoping in the very, very, near future, with more feedback, our publication will come to light," said Robert Duke, dean of the School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University. Before Azusa Pacific University purchased the scroll fragments, the university received assurances from William Kando that the Kando family had owned those fragments in the past, Duke said.

It's not certain when the 15 fragments sold through Les Enluminures will be studied and published. The institution in the United States that now owns those fragments has not made a public announcement about the acquisition, Hindman said.

Spokespersons for the Museum of the Bible, Azusa Pacific University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Lanier Theological Library all told Live Science that their institutions had not bought the Les Enluminures fragments.

Les Enluminures sent a batch of black-and-white photographs of the fragments to Live Science. The images show what appears to be Greek text on some of the fragments, a language that has been seen on other Dead Sea Scrolls. Hindman said she believes all 15 fragments were once in the collection of Bruce Ferrini, a collector in Ohio who died in 2010.

Hindman said that her information indicates that the 15 fragments were originally sold by the Kando family in 2002 before being passed through a series of collectors. William Kando expressed concerns about this claim, saying that he sold seven fragments in that year to a man named Craig Lampe and that he thinks some of those fragments later went to a "library in California" (a description that better matches Azusa Pacific University).

Duke said that he's not certain if Azusa's Dead Sea Scroll fragments were among those sold by the Kando family to Lampe in 2002.

Some of the 15 fragments may be part of the same scroll, and it's possible that in 2002, the 15 fragments were part of a few larger fragments that have since fallen apart Hindman said. She said she is convinced that the fragments are authentic. Lampe's antiquities business is now run by his son Joel Lampe, who did not return requests for comment.

Lingering questions

A number of Dead Sea Scroll fragments in America have already been published. These include 13 fragments that were published last year in the book "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection" (Brill, 2016) and are now in the collection of the Museum of the Bible, which is set to open in November 2017 in Washington, D.C., just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

In the book, scholars noted a number of suspicious features that might indicate the fragments are forgeries. The 13 scrolls were purchased in four lots from anonymous sellers between 2009 and 2014, according to the book. William Kando told Live Science that while a few fragments may have come from his family's collection, not all of them are from the Kandos.

However, the case for forgery is not settled. Ada Yardeni, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is in an expert in the paleography of the Dead Sea Scrolls (the study of their handwriting), told Live Science that her analysis indicated that all 13 fragments are authentic.  

Curators at the Museum of the Bible said that they are treating the scroll fragments at their institution as potential forgeries and are conducting scientific tests on them. The curators said they also plan to address the issue of authenticating Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the museum display.

Other Dead Sea Scroll fragments that have appeared in the past two decades in the United States have been described in scientific publications. These include: one fragment at Lanier Theological Library in Houston, one fragment at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio; a fragment from a collector in Pasadena, California, that scholars from the Foundation on Judaism and Christian Origins studied and published; and one published fragment at Azusa Pacific University.

Additionally, previously published fragments arrived in the U.S. in the mid-20th century and are now at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the Syrian Orthodox Church's eastern U.S. archdiocese.

Original article on Live Science.

Around the US

A map showing the location of Dead Sea Scroll fragments that are currently in America. Note 15 fragments were recently sold to an institution in the United States that hasn't made a public announcement and whose identity is unknown. The Museum of the Bible in Washington DC has 13 fragments, the largest collection in America whose location we know of.

A sample

A black and white picture of one of the 15 fragments that was recently sold and is now in an institution in the United States that hasn't made a public announcement. It was sold by an anonymous seller through the manuscript company Les Enluminures.

Greek letters

Another of the 15 fragments that was recently sold. There appears to be Greek letters on this fragment. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Greek.

Uncertain authenticity

A Dead Sea Scroll fragment, published last year, which is now in the collection of the Museum of the Bible. The authenticity of this fragment is uncertain. Scientific tests are being done and the museum plans to discuss the possibility of forgery and the challenges of authenticating ancient texts in their exhibit. If genuine this scroll fragment preserves parts of Micah 1:4-6 "the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire; like water poured down a slope. By the transgression of Jacob."

Burned by fire

A Dead Sea Scroll fragment, published last year, which is now in the collection of the Museum of the Bible. It preserves parts of Nehemiah 2:13-16. The authenticity of this scroll fragment is also uncertain. The scroll fragment was scorched by fire at some point.

Commands from the lord

This fragment is at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. It preserves part of Deuteronomy 27:4-6, a passage in which the lord commands that an altar be built for him at Mount Gerizim. A preliminary study of the fragment was written and published online in 2010 by James Charlesworth, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Preserving the past

A Dead Sea Scroll fragment which is at Lanier Theological Library in Houston. It preserves part of Amos 7:17 – 8:1. It was studied and published by Emanuel Tov, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hebrew scrolls

From virtual unwrapping to old-fashioned archaeological excavation, scientists are using a variety of techniques to reveal new information about the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls contain copies of books in the Hebrew Bible as well as community rulers, calendars, astronomy texts and other writings that scientists say were penned between about 200 B.C. and A.D. 70. In this countdown, Live Science looks at seven of these techniques.

Textile analysis

In addition to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the caves near Qumran also contain the remains of about 200 textiles. In 2011, a team of researchers reported that found that the scrolls are all made of linen, don't contain decoration and in some cases are bleached white — finds that support the idea that Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their study is detailed in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

Virtual unwrapping

Using a technique called "virtual unwrapping," scientists were able to read the remains of a charred 1,700-year-old scroll found at the site of En-Gedi, located in the Judean Desert. The scroll had been damaged by fire in ancient times and couldn't be unwrapped, physically, without falling apart. Instead, the scientists digitally scanned the scroll and then flattened the scanned results so they could read the text. They found it contained the beginning of the Hebrew bible's Book of Leviticus, the third of the five books of Moses, known as the Pentateuch.

New excavations

While archaeological excavation is not a new technique, it is important in the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Excavations are being carried out in caves in the Judean Desert to make sure that archaeological remains (including any undiscovered scrolls) are found before looters get to them. This image shows an excavation underway in a place that has come to be known as the "Cave of the Skulls," in Nahal Tse'elim in the Judean Desert. While this cave was previously excavated by archaeologists, recent looting activity indicates that there is more to be found.

Monitoring antiquities market

Over the past 15 years, more than 70 scroll fragments have turned up on the antiquities market. While some of them are forgeries, others may be real and scientists have been monitoring these fragments as they come on the market, using social media platforms such as Academia.edu to post updates on new scroll fragments.

Antiquities interdiction

To stem the tide of looting in the Judean Desertk, archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority have been working as part of a special unit to recover looted material. While the archaeologists are not at liberty to discuss details of how their unit recovers material, one operation led to the discovery of a papyrus dating back around 2,700 years, according to tests.

Digitization

In 2011, a digitization project was completed that allows anyone in the world to view high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls for free online. This project, a collaboration between the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Google, made it easier for researchers all over the world to access the scrolls. It also meant that members of the general public who are simply interested in viewing the scrolls could see them, in minute detail, at any time without having to travel to Israel.

Shown in this image, a conservation analyst from the Israeli Antiquities examines fragments of the 2000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls at a laboratory before photographing them on Dec. 18, 2012, in Jerusalem.

Ink analysis

Researchers have analyzed the ink of Dead Sea Scrolls, finding, among other things, a ratio of chlorine to bromine that indicates the ink was created near Qumran. Analysis has also suggests that a special type of ink, sometimes called "red ink," was used on at least one of the scrolls.

A cave that held Dead Sea Scrolls before they were stolen in the mid-20th century has been discovered near Qumran.

Inside the cave, archaeologists found a blank scroll along with the remains of jars, cloth and a leather strap. The researchers said they believe these items were used to bind, wrap and hold the scrolls.

Between 1947 and 1956, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a series of 11 caves located near the site of Qumran in what is now the West Bank. The scrolls contain copies of books of the Hebrew Bible along with community rules, calendars and astronomical texts, among other writings.

Some of the scrolls were found by the Bedouin people, who sold the artifacts to antiquities dealers, while other scrolls were found during archaeological excavations. [See Images of the Dead Sea Scrolls]

Archaeologists taking part in the excavation said they could tell from modern day pickaxes found in the cave that the newly discovered cave had been robbed. Thus, any scrolls that may have held writing were taken, the researchers said. The scientists added that they think the blank scroll found in the cave was, in ancient times, being prepared for writing.

"Although, at the end of the day, no scroll was found, and instead we 'only' found a piece of parchment rolled up in a jug that was being processed for writing, the findings indicate beyond any doubt that the cave contained scrolls that were stolen," said excavation director Oren Gutfeld, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, in a statement.

"The findings include the jars in which the scrolls and their covering were hidden, a leather strap for binding the scroll, a cloth that wrapped the scrolls, tendons and pieces of skin connecting fragments, and more," he added.

Some of the thousands of fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls that are now in museums or private collections could have come from this new cave rather than the 11 previously known caves, Gutfeld said. "Finding this additional scroll cave means we can no longer be certain that the original locations (Caves 1 through 11) attributed to the Dead Sea scrolls that reached the market via the Bedouins are accurate," Gutfeld said in the statement.

The excavation of the cave is part of a larger operation in which the Israel Antiquities Authority is trying to find and excavate caves in the Judean Desert that may hold archaeological remains. The operation was sparked by the activity of looters in the Judean desert. 

"The important discovery of another scroll cave attests to the fact that a lot of work remains to be done in the Judean Desert, and finds of huge importance are still waiting to be discovered," Israel Hasson, director-general of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in the statement.

"We are in a race against time as antiquities thieves steal heritage assets worldwide for financial gain. The state of Israel needs to mobilize and allocate the necessary resources in order to launch a historic operation, together with the public, to carry out a systematic excavation of all the caves of the Judean Desert," Hasson added. 

Original article on Live Science.

Dead Sea Scroll fragments

Two new books reveal about 25 unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls fragments held in two separate collections. The scroll seen here preserves parts of the Book of Leviticus and is now in the Schøyen Collection. In this fragment God promises that if the Sabbath is observed and the 10 commandments are obeyed the people of Israel will be rewarded. [Read more about the Dead Sea Scrolls finding]

More recently, archaeologists discovered a previously unknown cave in Qumran that would have held fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which was found inside.

Scorched by fire

This fragment preserves part of the Book of Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2:13-16) and is now in the Museum of the Bible, a 430,000-square-foot museum under construction near the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

No copies of Nehemiah were found by archaeologists in the Qumran caves, making the origins of this fragment a mystery. The fragment describes the return of a man named Nehemiah to Jerusalem after the city had been sacked by the Babylonians. He finds that the city gates had been "scorched by fire."

Book of Genesis

This fragment, now in the Museum of the Bible Collection, preserves part of the Book of Genesis. It tells part of the story of Jacob, a patriarch who, according to legend, the Israeli people are descended from.

[Read more about the Dead Sea Scrolls finding]

Book of Micah

A fragment from the Book of Micah (Micah 1:4–6), which is now in the Museum of the Bible. It describes a punishment that will be inflicted on Judah for the sins of Jacob. Part of the text reads: "The valleys will split open, like wax before the fire; like water poured down a slope…"

Qumran caves

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found by archaeologists and local Bedouin between 1947 and 1956 in caves near the site of Qumran in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. The origins of some of the new Dead Sea Scrolls are unknown. While the Bedouin sold some of the scrolls they found to private collectors it’s possible that some of the new fragments are from other caves in the Judean Desert or are modern day forgeries. This image shows some of the caves near Qumran.

Judean Desert

The Israel Antiquities Authority believes that new scrolls are being found by looters in caves in the Judean Desert. In response, a new initiative is being undertaken to search for and excavate any caves that may have scrolls in it to find these scrolls before the looters do. One dig will be starting in December 2016. This photo shows a mountainous area in the Judean Desert.

[Read more about the Dead Sea Scrolls finding]

Qumran Cave

Archaeologists also discovered another Qumran cave that likely held Dead Sea Scrolls, they said. The entrance to the cave near Qumran, Israel, that archaeologists recently discovered is seen, at left, in this image. Most of the scrolls in this cave had been robbed in the mid-20th century, said the researchers, who found modern-day pickaxe heads at the site.

Blank Parchment

he only scroll found in the Qumran cave was blank, though archaeologists believe that in ancient times it was being prepared for writing.

Scroll Jars

Fragments of jars, seen in this image, were found in the cave. Archaeologists believe that they contained scrolls that were robbed in the mid-20th century.

Wrapping scrolls

The remains of cloth that archaeologists believe was once wrapped around a scroll were found in the Qumran cave.

In 1947, or late 1946, the first batch of Dead Sea Scrolls was found in a cave located near the site of Qumran in what is now the West Bank. These bits of biblical history continue to perplex archaeologists to this day.

Not only are there still unanswered questions about the 2,000-year-old scrolls, but scientists continue to find fragments of the scrolls and other related artifacts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls include early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with a vast assortment of other texts, such as calendars, astronomical information and community rules. There is even one text, inscribed on copper, that discusses the location of buried treasure. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

A young bedouin shepherd named Muhammed ed-Dib is usually credited with having discovered the first batch of scrolls, which included a fragment of the Book of Isaiah. The exact date of the discovery is not known, and there are variations in the story of how ed-Dib found the first scrolls. (In many of the stories, ed-Dib was searching for lost sheep when he came across a cave containing the scrolls.) 

In the time after ed-Dib's discovery, thousands of additional fragments were uncovered in a series of 11 caves located near Qumran. Some of these fragments were found by the bedouin who, in turn, sold them to an antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin in Bethlehem. Other fragments were found in a series of archaeological excavations conducted in the 11 caves between 1949 and 1956.

The identity of the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a source of debate among scholars. Many believe that at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by people who belonged to a sect called the Essenes and that this sect used Qumran as a sort of monastery.

After 1956, more scrolls were discovered at other caves located in the Judaean Desert.

New discoveries

As the 70th anniversary of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery approaches, Live Science has learned of new discoveries that will be announced soon. An archaeological team has been excavating a cave located near Qumran since December. Members of the team have told Live Science that they have made some discoveries that the Israel Antiquities Authority will announce soon.

The Israeli media outlet Arutz Sheva reports that the team found jars that once held scrolls and cloth that the scrolls were once wrapped in but that the scrolls themselves appear to have been plundered in the mid 20^th century. [In Photos: New Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed]

Additionally, another team, which is excavating at a place known as the "Cave of Skulls," has made a series of discoveries that the newspaper Haaretz says include small fragments of scrolls. Archaeologists with the Cave of Skulls team declined to comment when contacted by Live Science, and an Israel Antiquities Authority spokesperson said the finds from the Cave of Skulls are still being analyzed.

The excavation of these two caves is part of a project that the Israel Antiquities Authority launched to excavate caves in the Judaean Desert that may contain archaeological remains. Over the past few years, looters have illegally excavated material from caves in the desert, with one illegal "dig" supposedly resulting in the discovery of a scroll that dates back around 2,700 years.

Antiquities market

In addition to the new scrolls reportedly being found in the Judaean Desert, some have supposedly turned up on the antiquities market. In 2016, approximately 25 previously unpublished fragments of "Dead Sea Scrolls," supposedly from Qumran, were described in two separate books. Research indicates that some of these scrolls are likely forgeries, while others may not be from Qumran but rather other caves in the Judaean Desert.

Over the past 15 years, about 70 alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments have turned up on the antiquities market, Eibert Tigchelaar, a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium, told Live Science last fall. Some of these 70 fragments are likely either forgeries or from other Judaean Desert caves, he said.

In the time since Live Science interviewed Tigchelaar, a company called Les Enluminures, which sells ancient and medieval manuscripts, has sold 15 fragments of "Dead Sea Scrolls" to an undisclosed institution in the United States. "The scrolls are now in an institution in the United States. I am not at liberty to reveal which one, until they make their own public announcement," said company CEO Sandra Hindman.

The company said these fragments were found by the bedouin who sold them to Shahin in the early 1960s. The asking price for all 15 fragments was $1 million.  "We have absolutely no doubts about their authenticity," Hindman said. Tigchelaar said that he will need to wait until higher quality photographs of the scroll fragments are available before he can analyze the fragments in detail.  

Original article on Live Science.

The site of Khirbet Qumran (a modern Arabic name) is located in the West Bank, near the northern edge of the Dead Sea, and is where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 11 nearby caves nearly 80 years ago. Though it has been decades since any scrolls were discovered, researchers announced in February 2017 that they had found a 12th cave near Qumran.

The first settlement was created during the Iron Age, but was abandoned about 2,600 years ago, long before the scrolls were made.

Archaeological work indicates that a second settlement existed between roughly 100 B.C. and A.D. 68, when it was captured by the Roman army and destroyed in a fire. The heat was so intense that modern-day archaeologists have found glass vessels "melted down" by it. It is in this settlement that many scholars believe at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before being hidden away.

In 1949, a joint expedition excavated the cave Muhammed found, called cave no. 1. Over the next decade, local Bedouin and scientific researchers would discover the remains of more than 900 manuscripts in 11 caves. Each cave is located near Qumran, the farthest one being just over 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) to the north of the site. The newly discovered 12th cave contained a blank scroll along with the remains of jars, cloth and a leather strap. The researchers said they believe these items were used to bind, wrap and hold the scrolls.

Recent analysis of textiles found with the scrolls shows that the textiles were originally used as clothing. They are all made of linen (even though wool was the more popular garment at the time), with most of them undecorated. The researchers argue that according to historical accounts these textiles are similar to those worn by people belonging to an ancient sect called the Essenes.

Digging up the past

Archaeologists will continue to dig up the past in 2017. But what can we expect them to uncover? Four out of the five predictionsthat Live Science made at the end of 2015 about major discoveries in 2016 came true. Read on to see whose bones and which major artifacts are most likely to be revealed in the year ahead.  

Iraq heritage emerges from ashes

An Iraqi-Kurdish army is in the process of retaking Mosul, the last major city held in Iraq by the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). In addition to killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, the terrorists embarked on a campaign of looting and destruction of archaeological sites. However, although the destruction was terrible, it did not annihilate everything.

When a Kurdish force retook Khorsabad, a former capital of the ancient Assyrians, they found numerous fragments of inscriptions and statues that had been brought to an archaeological center for repair and conservation. Similarly, archaeologists and historians will study, and at least partially repair, fragments of inscriptions and art that survived at Nimrud.  

Additionally, with the war over, archaeological teams likely will be able to return to more areas of Iraq and begin the process of conserving and excavating sites. Although the artifacts that ISIS looted to fund their war effort are now scattered all over the world, in time, they could gradually be discovered and returned to museums in Iraq and Syria where archaeologists and historians can conserve, study and display them properly. A court case is currently underway in which the United States government is seeking permission from a federal court to seize several artifacts which an ISIS leader was selling.

Great Pyramid chambers?

In October 2016, researchers with the ScanPyramids project announcedthat they had found two voids inside the Great Pyramid, a 4,500-year-old pyramid built for the pharaoh Khufu that was hailed as a "wonder of the world." The news was greeted with excitement; however, a scientific team overseeing the project cautioned that the voids in the team's data also could have appeared because the pyramid's interior was constructed of stones of various sizes.

The ScanPyramids project was extended by one year. That will allow time to produce more data that could answer the question of whether these voids are real and, if so, how large they are and whether they might contain anything. Even if the voids do not exist, the data may provide clues as to how the Great Pyramid was constructed. 

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Israel Antiquities Authority thinks more ancient scrolls remain to be found in the Judean Desert and that looters have already found some of them. The authority has announced a series of surveys, excavations and law-enforcement operations to find them this year.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1946 or 1947 by Bedouins in caves near the site of Qumran. Between 1947 and 1956, thousands of scroll fragments making up about 900 manuscripts were uncovered by archaeologists and Bedouins who sold the scrolls. Smaller batches of scrolls have been found at other sites in the Judean Desert since that time.

There are indications, however, that more undiscovered scrolls remain to be found in the Judean Desert. In October, Live Science reported on 25 new Dead Sea Scroll fragments that had been described in two books. They were purchased on the antiquities market, and scholars think that although some are forgeries, others might be from caves that looters discovered. Since 2002, about 70 fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls have appeared on the antiquities market, and that number is growing. Also in October, an anti-looting unit intercepted a 2,600-year-old papyrus fragment that was about to be sold (although there is a debate over whether it is authentic). 

Abydos discoveries

Two big discoveries from Abydos in Egypt were announced in 2016. In October, a team led by Josef Wegner, a curator at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, announced the discovery of a 3,800-year-old tableau that shows more than 120 ancient Egyptian boats. The tableau was found in a structure located near the tomb of pharaoh Senwosret III.

Just a few weeks later, an Egyptian team announced the discovery of a 5,000-year-old city at Abydos. The city has a necropolis (cemetery) next to it that contains 15 graves.

Archaeologists will resume excavations this year, and more new discoveries are likely to be made as a sizable amount of the site is unexcavated, the researchers noted. 

Biblical artifacts revealed

In the fall of 2017, a 430,000-square-foot (40,000 square meters) museum called the Museum of the Bible will open just three blocks south of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The museum will house the "Green Collection," made up of about 40,000 artifacts donated by Steve Green, president of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores. The artifacts have some connection to the Bible and include about a dozen Dead Sea Scrolls that were published recently. 

Green purchased his first artifact in 2009 and grew his collection rapidly. Much of his collection has never been studied by scholars. There are rumors that the collection includes a fragment of the Gospel of Mark that some scholars believe dates to the first century A.D., a date that would make it the oldest copy of a Christian Gospel known to exist. The Museum of the Bible has not confirmed or denied that this text is part of the Green Collection.

When this museum, with its vast collection, is open to the public in 2017, much will be revealed. Also, as scholars analyze the collection, many new discoveries will be made, they predict. Some of the artifacts will turn out to be modern-day forgeries, experts told Live Science.

Archaeological findings

This year, archaeologists dug up a wealth of treasures that unveiled not only some strange practices (like building a pyramid within a pyramid within a pyramid) but also some of the long-held secrets of well-known artifacts. From new Dead Sea Scrolls to the youngest mummy ever found in Egypt, to a 1,500-year-old stone complex the size of 200 American football fields to the tomb of Jesus, here's a look at the biggest archaeology stories of 2016.

Noah's ark mosaic

A mosaic depicting the story of Noah's ark was discovered this year within an ancient synagogue at the site of Huqoq in Israel. In the mosaic, the ark can be seen along with pairs of animals, including lions, bears and leopards. Another panel of the mosaic depicts the story of the parting of the Red Sea, showing ancient Egyptian soldiers, who were surrounded by overturned chariots, being eaten by giant fish. [Photos: Unusual Mosaics Decorated Ancient Synagogue in Israel]

Egypt's youngest mummy

A miniature coffin in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, holds what appears to be the youngest known Egyptian mummy. The coffin, made of cedar wood, was discovered at Giza in 1907 and dates back more than 2,500 years.

The fetus inside the coffin was only 16-18 weeks old after the time of gestation (when it was conceived) and likely died from a miscarriage. The coffin, which has tiny carvings on it, had been in the museum for over a century, but curators had assumed that it probably held internal organs from someone who was mummified. Not until CT scans were performed was the occupant of the tiny coffin revealed.

Virtually unwrapped scroll

Using a series of CT scans, scientists were able to "virtually unwrap" a burnt Dead Sea Scroll dating back around 1,700 years. The charred scroll was discovered in 1970 at the site of En Gedi near the Dead Sea in Israel. The well-known "Dead Sea Scrolls" were discovered between 1947 and 1956 at another site, this one called Qumran, also near the Dead Sea.

The En Gedi scroll's charred state made it extremely fragile and impossible to physically unwrap. The scans revealed the text of the scroll, which consists of part of the Book of Leviticus. The precise date of the scroll isn't clear, though it appears to date back around 1,700 years or possibly a bit earlier, the researchers said. A similar CT-scan technique was used in 2015 to read charred 2,000-year-old scrolls from the site of Herculaneum in Italy.

Pyramid within a pyramid within a pyramid

Archaeologists discovered that the El Castillo pyramid at Chichén Itzá in Mexico actually consists of a pyramid within a pyramid within a pyramid. The outermost pyramid was constructed sometime between 950 and 1000, while the pyramid within that pyramid was constructed sometime between 850 and 900, and a pyramid within that was constructed sometime between 600 and 800.

To make the discovery, scientists conducted an electrical resistivity survey of the outermost pyramid. Electrical resistivity is a widely used technique in archaeology, in which electrical currents are passed through a structure, or the ground, and the resistance encountered by the currents is measured. These measurements are then used to help determine what lies underneath a surface.

Ancient Egyptian boat tableau

More than 120 boat carvings were discovered within a structure at the site of Abydos, in Egypt, that dates back more than 3,800 years. The structure is located near the tomb of pharaoh Senwosret III.

The largest carvings are nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length and show "large, well-rendered boats depicted with masts, sails, rigging, deckhouses/cabins, rudders, oars and in some cases rowers," wrote expedition leader Josef Wegner in an article published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology this year. Inside the structure, archaeologists also found planks that they said are likely from a wooden boat that used to be inside the structure.

Kazakhstan megalithic site

Archaeologists announced the discovery of a 1,500-year-old stone complex in Kazakhstan that sprawls over 300 acres (120 hectares) of land, or more than 200 American football fields. A large amount of work remains to be done. However, archaeologists can already report the discovery of a saddle made partly of silver and stones carved with images of weapons and creatures. The complex may have been constructed by the Huns, a people who traveled across Asia and Europe and came into conflict with the Roman Empire.

Excavation of the "tomb of Jesus"

Archaeologists recently excavated a tomb in Jerusalem that people in ancient times believed held the remains of Jesus Christ. According to legend, the tomb was discovered in the fourth century after Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine (who legalized Christianity and supposedly converted to it), traveled to Jerusalem and ordered excavations to find the tomb's location. After Jesus' tomb was identified, according to legend, the imperial family ordered that a shrine be built over the site. Records indicate that by 1555 the tomb had been damaged. In order to protect the tomb, marble cladding was built over it. The cladding covered and sealed the tomb.

In 2016, a team of archaeologists opened the tomb in order to carry out conservation work and learn more about the site. They found the limestone bed, which, according to legend, Christ's body had been placed on after he was crucified. The excavations may shed more light on the tomb and the legends behind it.

Unknown branch of humanity

Sometime between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago, humans interbred with an unknown branch of humanity, a new genetic study revealed this year. It would have happened sometime after Homo sapiens migrated from Africa.

"We believe that they interbred with modern humans shortly before modern humans crossed into the ancient continent of Sahul — what is now Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania — some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago," Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told Live Science. The discovery was made by analyzing the genomes of present-day aboriginal Australians.

New Dead Sea Scrolls

Twenty-five previously unknown Dead Sea Scrolls were described this year in two separate books. The scrolls contain parts of the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Ruth, Kings, Micah, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Joshua, Judges, Proverbs, Numbers, Psalms, Ezekiel and Jonah. All of these scrolls were purchased by collectors in the antiquities market. Experts interviewed by Live Science said that some of the scrolls may be forgeries. These scrolls are just 25 of more than 70 Dead Sea Scrolls that have appeared on the antiquities market in the past 20 years.

Additionally, an Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) team seized a papyrus dating to the seventh century B.C. that was bound for the antiquities market. The IAA said that the papyrus was found by looters in a cave in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. This papyrus may also be a forgery, some experts told Live Science.

In the wake of these newly discovered scrolls, the IAA has undertaken a new project to survey and excavate any remaining caves in the Judean Desert, near the Dead Sea, that may hold scrolls.

A rare, 2,700-year-old papyrus with Hebrew script that had been looted from a cave in the Judean Desert has been seized in an elaborate operation by the Israel Antiquities Authority, archaeologists announced today (Oct. 26).

However, a professor at George Washington University has provided information to Live Science indicating that the papyrus may be a sophisticated modern-day forgery.  

The papyrus' Hebrew text translates as: "from the king's maidservant, from Na'arat, jars of wine, to Jerusalem," the capital city of the Kingdom of Judah, according to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The document indicates "payment of taxes or transfer of goods to storehouses in Jerusalem, the capital city of the kingdom at this time," the IAA statement read.

"This is the most ancient mentioning of Jerusalem outside of the Bible in Hebrew script," said Eitan Klein, who holds a doctorate in archaeology and is the deputy director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, which seized the papyrus. [See Images of the Rare Hebrew Papyrusfrom the Judean Desert]

Carbon dating and an analysis of the writing on the papyrus suggest it dates to the seventh century B.C., Klein said. The operation carried out to save the papyrus revealed that the looters found it in a cave located in the Nahal Hever valley, Klein said. He added that he can't reveal the cave's name in order to keep looters away.

If authenticated, this papyrus would be one of only two Hebrew papyri that date as far back as the seventh century B.C., said Shmuel Ahituv, a retired professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in the statement. The suggestion in the writing that a woman ("the king's maidservant") held an administrative post that allowed her to oversee the transport of wine to Jerusalem is also interesting, Ahituv said. 

Tracking the looters

Klein told Live Science how the elaborate operation to seize the papyrus was carried out.

"We got information about a Palestinian group of looters from the southern Hebron Hills who were digging at the Nahal Hever in the Judean Desert," said Klein, adding that his unit "got reliable information that they found a scroll." This occurred about three years ago, Klein said, declining to give a specific date when the tip first came in.

However, Christopher Rollston, a professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at George Washington University, told Live Science that he saw the scroll three years ago however it was not in a cave.

"I [saw] some good images in Jerusalem about three years ago. Nice images. It wasn't in some cave three years ago," he wrote in an email. In a post on his blog, he said that the papyrus "is from the antiquities market and it has been floating around on the market for a few years now." [Photos: Israeli Police Seize Stolen Ancient Coffins]

Klein said that three years ago his team was tracking the looters through the Judean Desert. "We succeeded to track [the] group of looters from the Judean Desert until the point that they tried to sell it to someone in the antiquities market in Jerusalem," Klein said, declining to say when his team first encountered the scroll in Jerusalem.  

Even though the looters hadn't succeeded in selling it, they had passed the scroll to intermediaries who were trying to facilitate the sale, he said.

Live Science heard a rumor that the IAA had paid someone to give the papyrus to the team so that the scroll would not be harmed during a raid. When asked whether this rumor was true, Klein said: "I cannot specify exactly how we got it, but it was very complex and eventually, no [we didn't pay them]."

Klein didn't deny, however, that money had changed hands, at least at one point during the operation. "I cannot specify about that," he said.

Klein's team continued to track down the looters, ultimately arresting them in the Judean Desert. "We caught the group of looters in the field when they excavated at other caves," he said.

During the operation to seize the scroll, Klein's team identified two other groups of looters who were also from the southern Hebron Hills and caught them, seizing more ancient texts in the process.

The unit identified three caves in three separate valleys in the Judean Desert where looting activities were underway. Rescue operations were carried out to excavate the remaining artifacts, including two scroll fragments dating back around 2,000 years, in those caves.

Is it authentic?

"There are some palaeographic anomalies and inconsistencies in this papyrus inscription that suggest it may be modern, not ancient," Rollston said.

He added that "the fact that the papyrus itself has been carbon-dated to the seventh century BCE certainly does not mean that the writing on the papyrus is ancient. After all, ancient papyrus is readily available for purchase online, thus, no modern forger worth his salt would forge an inscription on modern papyrus. Rather, he would purchase some ancient papyrus online and then write a text on it. It happens fairly often."

Sometimes even the most authentic-looking scroll can be a forgery. For instance, Live Science recently reported on 70 new "Dead Sea Scroll" fragmentsthat had appeared on the antiquities market over the last 15 years. Scholars have expressed concern that some of the new scrolls could be forgeries, while others could be from looting in the Judean Desert. [See Photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments] 

Klein said that he has no doubt this 2,700-year-old papyrus is authentic, partly because his team knows exactly where it was found three years ago.

It's possible that the Israel Antiquities Authority was fooled by forgers who managed to throw them off the scroll's true origins, Rollston said. "Forgeries are often reported to have been found here, or there, at some specific location," wrote Rollston on his blog. 

Klein says he will need to talk to Rollston and compare notes before he can comment further. He said that he is interested in hearing what Rollston knows about the papyrus.

Original article on Live Science.

More than 25 previously unpublished "Dead Sea Scroll" fragments, dating back 2,000 years and holding text from the Hebrew Bible, have been brought to light, their contents detailed in two new books.

The various scroll fragments record parts of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Ruth, Kings, Micah, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Joshua, Judges, Proverbs, Numbers, Psalms, Ezekiel and Jonah. The Qumran caves ― where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered ― had yet to yield any fragments from the Book of Nehemiah; if this newly revealed fragment is authenticated it would be the first.

Scholars have expressed concerns that some of the fragments are forgeries. [See Photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments] 

These 25 newly published fragments are just the tip of the iceberg. A scholar told Live Science that around 70 newly discovered fragments have appeared on the antiquities market since 2002. Additionally, the cabinet minister in charge of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), along with a number of scholars, believes that there are undiscovered scrolls that are being found by looters in caves in the Judean Desert. The IAA is sponsoring a new series of scientific surveys and excavations to find these scrolls before looters do.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in a series of 11 caves by the archaeological site of Qumran in the Judean Desert, near the Dead Sea. During that time, archaeologists and local Bedouins unearthed thousands of fragments from nearly 900 manuscripts.

Some of the Bedouin sold their scrolls in Bethlehem through an antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin, who went by the name "Kando." Shahin died in 1993 and his son William Kando now runs his business and estate.

Many scholars believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden in the Qumran caves around A.D. 70, during a Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. They may have been written by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes.

Qumran and its caves are located in the West Bank, a territory captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967. Jordan at times has asserted that the Dead Sea Scrolls belong to them.

Although the term Dead Sea Scrolls usually refers to the scrolls found at Qumran, there have been scrolls found in caves at other sites in the Judean Desert that are considered Dead Sea Scrolls. 

Collecting scrolls

The 25 newly published scroll fragments were purchased by two separate collectors. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

Between 2009 and 2014, Steve Green, the owner of Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts and crafts stores, purchased 13 of the fragments, which he has donated, along with thousands of other artifacts, to the Museum of the Bible. Green is helping to fund construction of the museum, scheduled to open in Washington, D.C., next fall. (A fly-through of the museum can be seen on YouTube).

A team of scholars has published details of these donated fragments in the book volume "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection" (Brill, 2016).

The provenance of this batch of scrolls is not certain.

"Some of these fragments must have come from Qumran, probably Cave 4, while the others may have derived from other sites in the Judean Desert," wrote Emanuel Tov, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the book volume. "Unfortunately, little is known about the provenance of these fragments because most sellers did not provide such information at the time of the sale."

Antiquities dealer William Kando told Live Science that he doesn't know where the donated fragments originated.

Scientists are conducting tests on the donated fragments to help determine if any are forgeries, said Michael Holmes, executive director of the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, in a statement sent to Live Science.

The results will be combined with an analysis of the writing to help determine what the chances are of the different fragments being forgeries.

"The results will be incorporated in our future museum exhibits, inviting visitors to grasp and engage with issues involved with assessing authenticity," Holmes said.

Biblical manuscripts

Martin Schøyen, a collector from Norway, owns the other batch of the recently revealed Dead Sea Scrolls. The texts from those fragments are detailed in the book "Gleanings from the Caves: Dead Sea Scrolls and Artefacts from The Schøyen Collection" (Bloomsbury, 2016). Also detailed in the book are other artifacts related to the scrolls, including a linen wrapper in which one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was found. [Photos: Who 'Penned' the Dead Sea Scrolls?]

Schøyen, who has a vast collection of antiquities, began collecting biblical manuscripts in 1986. "The ultimate challenge had become to acquire a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls with a biblical text," Schøyen wrote in the book. "It was for me a 'Mission: Impossible.'"

His determination paid off as, gradually, he was able to track down scroll fragments that were for sale by a number of sources. He bought several from a family collection that is now in in Zurich (the name was not published) and several more from the descendants of tourists or collectors who had purchased scrolls from Shahin's shop in Bethlehem in the 1950s. He also purchased a few fragments that were once owned by two scholars who had worked in the Qumran caves as students in 1948 (the students got the fragments as gifts from a bishop who supported the work).

"The quest that started as a 'Mission: Impossible' in 1986, gradually proceeded to become a collection of [about] 115 fragments from around 27 different scrolls,"  Schøyen said. He added that some of the fragments in his collection come from caves 1, 4 and 11 at Qumran, while some come from other caves in the Judean Desert.

Nehemiah

A highlight from the newly published Museum of the Bible collection is a fragment from the Book of Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2:13-16).

The fragment tells of a man named Nehemiah who lived during the fifth century B.C., at a time after Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The Persian Empire had taken over Babylon's territory and the Jews, who had been forced to leave Israel by the Babylonians, were allowed to return home.

The fragment records Nehemiah's visit to a ruined Jerusalem, finding that its gates had been "consumed by fire." According to the fragment text, he inspects the remains of the walls before starting work on rebuilding them.

Scholars have noted in previous studies that archaeologists hadn't found any copies of the Book of Nehemiah in the Qumran caves. How this fragment came to America is unknown, and scholars say they can't be sure it's from Qumran.

"It is assumed to come from Cave 4 [at Qumran], but in the final analysis it must be said that the provenance of the fragment remains unknown," wrote Martin G. Abegg Jr., a professor at Trinity Western University who led the team that analyzed the fragment, in the book "Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection."

Leviticus

A highlight from the Schøyen Collection is a fragment containing part of the Book of Leviticus. In the fragment text, God promises that if the Sabbath is observed and the Ten Commandments are obeyed, the people of Israel will be rewarded.

"If you walk according to my laws, and keep my commandments and implement them, then I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit," part of the fragment reads (translation by Torleif Elgvin).

"I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled by anyone; and I will exterminate vicious beasts from the land, and no sword shall cross your land," the fragment continues. "I will look with favour upon you, and make you fertile and multiply you."

Schøyen published a note from William Kando saying that the Leviticus scroll fragment was once owned by his father who got it from Bedouin in 1952 or 1953 and it was sold, along with other fragments, to a customer in Zurich in 1956. 

Original article on Live Science.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are about 2,000 years old and hold text from the Hebrew Bible. Hundreds of fragments of the scrolls were first found between 1947 and 1956 in caves in Qumran in the Judean Desert.

More recently, additional scroll fragments have come to light. Since 2002, around 70 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments have appeared on the antiquities market, said Eibert Tigchelaar, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, in an interview with Live Science.

Tigchelaar believes that some of the scroll fragments that have recently appeared are actually modern-day forgeries, while others are not from Qumran, but rather other caves in the Judean Desert, possibly ones that haven't been discovered by archaeologists.

"I think what we have here is a mix of material that is authentic and of material that are forgeries," Tigchelaar told Live Science.

One of his arguments supporting the forgery claim is that of the 70 fragments that have appeared only one or two seem to be part of the 900 manuscripts found in the Qumran caves. To have so many scroll fragments that are not part of the other manuscripts found at Qumran is "statistically impossible," Tigchelaar said. [25 New 'Dead Sea Scrolls' Revealed]

Additionally, Tigchelaar has found that most of the 70 new scroll fragments are from books of the Hebrew Bible, whereas the manuscripts found at Qumran contain a wider mix of texts, including calendars, community rules and apocryphal (noncanonical) texts.

Some of the new scroll fragments also contain oddities in their writing, such as small letters that appear to be crammed in at the edge of fragments (a fragment is supposed to be part of a manuscript that fell apart), Tigchelaar and other scholars have found.

Some of the scrolls may be authentic but not from Qumran, Tigchelaar said noting that the sellers could claim the scrolls were found in Qumran in order to boost the sales price or to avoid legal problems related to provenance.

After Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, laws were enacted that prohibited the selling of newly discovered scrolls. "If they [the new scroll fragments] were found after 1967, they [collectors and dealers] would not be allowed to own them or to sell them, but they would have to give them to the Israel Antiquities Authority," Tigchelaar said. He said that a close examination of the provenance of the new scroll fragments is needed. [See Photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments] 

Search for more Scrolls

More undiscovered scrolls are likely hidden in the Judean Desert, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said, adding that looters are probably already finding them. Last year, the antiquities authority launched a series of surveys and excavations in the Judean desert to try to find caves that may contain undiscovered scrolls.

"For years now our most important heritage and cultural assets have been excavated illicitly and plundered in the Judean Desert caves for reasons of greed," Miri Regev, Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports, said in a statement. "The goal of the national plan that we are advancing is to excavate and find all of the scrolls that remain in the caves, once and for all, so that they will be rescued and preserved by the state."

A team led by Randall Price, a professor at Liberty University in Virginia, and Oren Gutfeld, a researcher with the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem, will lead an excavation of one cave in the Judean Desert, which is set to begin in December.

That cave was partially excavated in the past, but "much remains to be excavated, including two wings of the cave at the back. There is always the possibility of finding scroll fragments because this cave, as well as others, shows signs of habitation from the time when the Qumran community who produced the scrolls was active," Price said.

Even if no scrolls are discovered, the remains of any artifacts Price and the team find can help archaeologists learn more about life at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, Price said.

The Museum of the Bible has also formed an alliance with the IAA that will allow it to display artifacts from Israel's National Treasures, including discoveries that will be made in the future.

"Because the Israel Antiquities Authority currently has 39 active archeological digs around Israel, some of the artifacts that might be displayed in [the] Museum of the Bible may not even have been discovered yet," the museum said in a statement in 2015.

Original article on Live Science. 

The Great Isaiah Scroll

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the best preserved of the scrolls, and is nearly complete.

The Great Isaiah Scroll, Translated

At the Israel Museum's website, mousing over the Great Isaiah Scroll provides an English translation of the text.

The Temple Scroll

The Temple scroll is the thinnest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered in 1956, it contains God's instructions on how to run the Temple.

Fragments of the Temple Scroll

Parts of the Temple Scroll are poorly preserved.

The War Scroll

The War Scroll, also known as "The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness," tells an end-of-days-style tale of a battle between good and evil.

Community Rule

The Community Rule Scroll is a sort of manual for life, from governing who joins the community to laying down rules about how to behave at communal meals.

The Community Rule Scroll

Another view of the Community Rule Scroll. The scroll was found in 1947.

Commentary on Habakkuk

The Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll analyses the biblical book of the prophet Habakkuk.

Finding the Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves in Qumran, Israel. Shown here, Cave 1, where the Great Isaiah scroll was discovered, and Cave 2.

En-Gedi scroll

In addition to referring to the original scrolls, the term "Dead Sea Scroll" includes other scrolls found in the desert of present-day Israel from that time period. The En-Gedi scroll is one of them. A fire burned the scroll in about A.D. 600, but a complex digital analysis called "virtual unwrapping" has allowed researchers to see inside it.The analysis allowed researchers to determine that the En-Gedi holds the first part of the Book of Leviticus, one of the five books of Moses that make up the Torah, the Jewish bible.

Micro-CT Scanner

Researchers in Israel used a micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanner to look at the fragile En-Gedi scroll, which experts could not unfurl without damaging it.

Merging Text

A research team in Kentucky took the digital micro-CT scan of the En-Gedi scroll and then virtually enhanced and flattened it. Then, they merged the results into one flat 2D image.

The En-Gedi scroll, a text that includes part of the Book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible that was ravaged by fire about 1,400 years ago, is now readable, thanks to a complex digital analysis called "virtual unwrapping."

Rather than physically unfurl the scroll, which would have destroyed the crumbling artifact, experts digitally scanned the document, and then virtually flattened the scanned results, allowing scholars to read its ancient text.

"We're reading a real scroll," lead study author Brent Seales, professor and chairman in the department of computer science at the University of Kentucky, said in a news conference yesterday (Sept. 20). "It hasn't been read for millennia. Many thought it was probably impossible to read." [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]

Archaeologists found the scroll in 1970 in En-Gedi, where an ancient Jewish community thrived from about the late 700s B.C. until about A.D. 600, when a fire destroyed the site, the researchers said. Excavations of the synagogue's Holy Ark, a chest or cupboard that holds the Torah scrolls, revealed charred scrolls of parchment, or animal skin. But each scroll was "completely burned and crushed, had turned into chunks of charcoal that continued to disintegrate every time they were touched," the researchers wrote in the study.

The En-Gedi scroll is different than the original Dead Sea Scrolls, which a young shepherd discovered in caves near Qumran in the Judean Desert in 1947. However, Dead Sea Scroll has become an umbrella term for many ancient scrolls found in the area, and some researchers also call the En-Gedi artifact a Dead Sea Scroll.

The scorched En-Gedi scroll fragments sat in storage for more than 40 years until experts decided to give them another look, and try the newly developed "virtual unwrapping" method for the first time on the scroll.

Cyber scroll

The virtual journey began in Israel, where experts digitally scanned the rolled-up scroll with X-ray-based micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). At this point, they weren't sure whether the scroll had text within it, said study co-author Pnina Shor, curator and head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Projects at the Israel Antiquities Authority. So, they increased the spatial resolution of the scan, allowing them to capture whether or not each layer had detectable ink.

Their exhaustive attention to detail paid off: There was ink, and it likely contained metal, such as iron or lead, because it showed up on the micro-CT scan as a dense material, the researchers said.

However, the text was illegible. So Shor and her colleagues in Israel sent the digital scans to Seales in Kentucky so he and his team could try the new "virtual unwrapping" technique.

"It was certainly a shot in the dark," Shor said.

Virtual unwrapping

This new method marks the first time that experts have virtually unrolled and noninvasively studied a severely damaged scroll with ink text, Seales said.

The unwrapping took time and involved three steps: segmentation, texturing and flattening, he said.

With segmentation, they identified each segment, or layer, within the digital scroll, which had five complete revolutions of parchment in the scroll. Then, they created a virtual geometric mesh for each layer made of tiny, digital triangles. They were able to manipulate this mesh, which helped them "texture" the document, or make the text more visible.

"This is where we see letters and words for the first time on the recreated page," the researchers wrote in the study.

Finally, they digitally flattened the scroll, and merged the different layers together into one, flat 2D image that could easily be read. [In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World]

Book of Leviticus

The scroll holds the beginning of the Book of Leviticus, the third of the five books of Moses (known as the Pentateuch) that make up the Hebrew Bible, biblical scholars said. In fact, the En-Gedi scroll contains the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a Holy Ark, the researchers said.

The virtual unwrapping revealed two distinct columns of text that include, in total, 35 lines of Hebrew. Each line has 33 to 34 letters. However, there are only consonants, no vowels. This indicates that the text was written before the ninth century A.D., when Hebrew symbols for vowels were invented, said study co-author Emanuel Tov, a professor emeritus in the department of Bible at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Radiocarbon dating places the scroll in the third or fourth century A.D., but studies based on historical handwriting place it at either the first or second century A.D., the researchers said. Regardless, the data suggest that it was written within the first few centuries of the Common Era, they said.

These dates make the En-Gedi scroll slightly younger than the original Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written between about 200 B.C. and A.D. 70.

"Hence, the En-Gedi scroll provides an important extension to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of almost 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text," the researchers wrote in the study.

Moreover, the En-Gedi text is "completely identical" to the text and paragraph breaks found in medieval Hebrew Bibles, which are known as the Masoretic text, a text that is still used today. In antiquity until the first century B.C., there were an "endless number of textual forms" of the Masoretic text, earning them the name "proto-Masoretic," Tov said.

But the En-Gedi finding suggests that the standard Masoretic text coalesced relatively early, he said.

"This is quite amazing for us," Tov said. "That in 2,000 years, this text has not changed."

The study was published online today (Sept. 21) in the journal Science Advances.

Original article on Live Science.

A burned 1,500-year-old Hebrew scroll found on the shore of the Dead Sea was recently deciphered, 45 years after archaeologists discovered it, researchers in Israel have announced.

"The deciphering of the scroll, which was a puzzle for us for 45 years, is very exciting," Sefi Porath, the archaeologist who discovered the scroll in 1970 in Ein Gedi, Israel, said in a statement from The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The Ein Gedi parchment scroll is the oldest scroll discovered from the Hebrew Bible since the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date to the end of the Second Temple period, about 2,000 years ago.   

The parchment scroll was so charred that it was illegible to the naked eye. Only with advanced technology did the scroll reveal the opening verses of the book of Leviticus, the third book of the Hebrew Bible. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Scorched scrolls

The researchers weren't expecting to be able to pull information from the burned scroll.

"This discovery absolutely astonished us; we were certain it was just a shot in the dark but decided to try and scan the burnt scroll anyway," said Pnina Shor, curator and director of the IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls Project.

The fire damage to the Ein Gedi scrolls made themimpossible to open, so the IAA worked with scientists from Israel and abroad to scan the scrolls with a microcomputed tomography machine (micro-CT), which is "just like what they do in the doctor's office but at a very high resolution, probably a hundred times more accurate than the medical procedures that we do," said Brent Seales, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky. Seales analyzed the scans with a digital imaging software that virtually unrolled the scroll and allowed him to visualize the text.

Seales wanted to unpack the layers of the scroll to reconstruct how the text would look if the scroll were opened. "Initially, we didn't know if there would be writing, or what the writing would be, so it was absolutely a big mystery revealed right at the lab," Seales told Live Science.

'Garden of Eden'

The scrolls were unearthed in Ein Gedi, which translates to "Spring of the Goat," a desert oasis on the western shore of the Dead Sea, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Jerusalem. Based on ruins of a Chalcolithic, or early Bronze Age, sanctuary dating to the year 4000 B.C., Ein Gedi's first known residents established themselves there about 5,000 years ago.

The oasis is notable in the Bible as the site where King David fled to escape the jealous and vengeful King Saul. David survived and eventually succeeded Saul as King of Israel from around 1010 to 970 B.C.

"Ein Gedi was a Jewish village in the Byzantine period (A.D. 4th to 7th centuries) and had a synagogue with an exquisite mosaic floor and a Holy Ark," Porath said. This marked the first time that an archaeological dig had uncovered a Torah scroll in a synagogue, Porath noted. [Image Gallery: Ancient Texts Go Online]

The Holy Ark is a chest or cupboard, often ornately carved, with doors that open away from each other to reveal the Torah scrolls. These arks typically sit toward the front of a synagogue.

Ein Gedi "was completely burnt to the ground, and none of its inhabitants ever returned to reside there again, or to pick through the ruins in order to salvage valuable property," Porath said. During archaeological excavations of the burned synagogue, researchers found fragments of the burned scrolls; a bronze, seven-branched candelabrum (or menorah); the community's money box holding 3,500 coins, glass and ceramic oil lamps; and perfume vessels, Porath explained.

"We have no information regarding the cause of the fire, but speculation about the destruction ranges from bedouin raiders from the region east of the Dead Sea to conflicts with the Byzantine government," Porath said.

Although the Ein Gedi scrolls were recovered not too far from the well-known Dead Sea Scrolls, they are considered separate Seales said, because they were found in a synagogue. 

The Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden from approaching Roman armies in caves near Qumran in the Judean Desert, which extends east of Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. The ancient scrolls weren't discovered again until 1947, when a bedouin shepherd of Arab ancestry happened upon them.

The iconic Dead Sea Scrolls date from the third to first centuries A.D. Although Hebrew is most frequently used throughout the scrolls, about 15 percent is in Aramaic, and several writings are in Greek. The 230 manuscripts are often referred to as "biblical scrolls" because they are copies of works that make up the Hebrew Bible.

The text

On the newly decipheredscroll, the text (from the beginning of the book of Leviticus), translated from the original Hebrew, reads as follows:

“The Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When any of you bring an offering of livestock to the Lord, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock. If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd, you shall offer a male without blemish; you shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting, for acceptance in your behalf before the Lord. You shall lay your hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be acceptable in your behalf as atonement for you. The bull shall be slaughtered before the Lord; and Aaron’s sons the priests shall offer the blood, dashing the blood against all sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. The burnt offering shall be flayed and cut up into its parts. The sons of the priest Aaron shall put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire. Aaron’s sons the priests shall arrange the parts, with the head and the suet, on the wood that is on the fire on the altar." (Leviticus 1:1-8).

The biblical text marks the first time a Torah scroll was found inside a synagogue in any archaeological excavation, according to the IAA.

"The knowledge that we are preserving the most important find of the 20th century and one of the Western world's most important cultural treasures causes us to proceed with the utmost care and caution, and use the most advanced technologies available today," Porath said.

"This collection at the IAA is full of other fragments that might be analyzed, so in a way, this is a beginning rather than an ending," Seales said.

Elizabeth Goldbaum is on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science

A band of antiquities thieves were sentenced to 18 months in prison after being caught red-handed looting an ancient cave in Israel.

The six thieves were caught plundering the 2,000-year-old archaeological site known as the "Cave of the Skulls." In the process, they destroyed some of the cliffside where the cave was located.

The six men, all members of the same family, "worked as an organized team of professional criminals who are experts in this field, who collected information and planned meticulously before coming to perpetrate the crimes," according to the ruling statement from the Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court, which sentenced the men on June 4.

The looters pled guilty to damaging an ancient site, excavating an ancient site without a permit, conspiring to commit a crime, and unlawfully residing in Israel, according to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority. They were sentenced to 18 months in prison and slapped with a 12,000-shekel ($3,139) fine. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Ancient site

The Cave of the Skulls is embedded in a steep cliff overlooking the valley of Nahal Ze'elim, not far from the Dead Sea. The only way to get to the site on foot is to navigate a narrow gazelle path that winds around a slope strewn with loose stones. Ancient peoples occupied the sites in two different periods — during the Chalcolithic period, about 6,000 years ago, and during the Roman period, about 2,000 years ago.

In November 2014, members of a search-and-rescue team were training on the cliffs when they noticed a suspicious movement near the caves. They notified inspectors from the Israel Antiquities Authority, who then conducted a stakeout. That stakeout turned up six looters; the authorities apprehended the men as they were climbing back up the cliff face toward their car at the top. They were carrying several stolen artifacts from the site, most notably a wooden lice comb from the Roman period.

The group was also found with ropes, digging equipment, food and a metal detector. The illicit diggers had disturbed the geological layers of the site, scattered shards of pottery and dug deep holes at the site, causing significant damage, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The plunderers may have been hunting for as-yet-undiscovered texts from 2,000 years ago, inspectors speculate. The arid conditions of the Judean Desert preserve parchment and papyrus, and since the 1940s, archaeologists have unearthed many such artifacts in the region, including ancient versions of the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in similar cliffside caves known as the Qumran Caves, located in the Judean Desert in the West Bank.

"For many years now, gangs of antiquities robbers have been operating along the Judean Desert cliffs," Amir Ganor, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority's unit for the prevention of antiquities robbery, said in a previous statement. "The robbers attempt to locate and find the Dead Sea Scrolls, pieces of ancient texts and unique artifacts that were left in the caves."

Israel's rich archaeological legacy makes it an attractive lure for would-be antiquities thieves. In April 2015, Israel police arrested a group of people on suspicion of stealing 2,000-year-old coins. In March 2014, the police seized 11 ossuaries, or bone boxes, as thieves were closing a deal to smuggle them out of the country.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The original appearance of Israel's Declaration of Independence was recreated today (Jan. 6), using a high-tech photography technique that was first developed to help preserve the ancient Dead Sea scrolls.

Last year, archivists took a digital photo of the document, but the new recreation was made using a specialized camera system in the Lunder Dead Sea Scrolls Conservation Laboratory at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The camera focuses several different wavelengths of light on the document, ranging from visible light to near-infrared light. The multi-spectrum image will make it possible to recreate the original texture of the scroll's material, ink and the intricacies of its surface. [Photos: A Walk Through Israel's Old Jaffa]

The visible light creates an exact color photo of the declaration, while the infrared light recreates the letters that have faded in the centuries since the document was first written. The result will be an accurate color and legible photographic copy of the historic document.

"It is exciting and symbolic to document the Declaration of Independence today, one of the cornerstones of the State of Israel, with technology developed specifically for the Dead Sea Scrolls — the earliest Hebrew texts, two thousand years old, which were first discovered on the eve of the establishment of the state, at the time when the Declaration of Independence was written," Pnina Shor, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement.

Archivists will also take advantage of the document being removed from its temperature- and light-controlled environment to evaluate the document's current state and identify any areas that need to be repaired. Experts will also plan how to best preserve the document.

Israel state archivist Yaacov Lozowick said experts are still deciding how to display the document to the public, so for now, efforts will focus on recording and preserving the declaration. Currently, the 46-inch-long (117 centimeters) and 12-inch-wide (30 cm) document will remain in its specially designed preservation facility, where it's kept behind lock and key.

Israel's Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. Historians think the signed document is Israel's first record of its people's desire for a democratic state.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 in the Qumran caves in present-day Israel. The collection includes about 900 scrolls of papyrus and parchment. Researchers have dated the documents between the third century B.C. and A.D. 68.

The Dead Sea Scrolls document the lives of a Jewish sect called the Essenes. Historians do not agree on the significance behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, but most agree that the documents inspired parts of the New Testament in the Bible, even though there is no specific mention of Jesus Christ in the texts.

The caves where the original Dead Sea Scrolls were found are still revealing secrets. In March, 2014, new scrolls with biblical text were discovered deep in the cave system.

Follow Kelly Dickerson on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A gang of robbers accused of trying to steal the Dead Sea Scrolls from a cave in the Judean Desert was indicted Sunday (Dec. 7) in Israel.

The group was caught red-handed looting historical artifacts, and the robbers were apprehended in what Israeli officials called a "dramatic capture" that played out along the high cliffs of a region of the Judean Desert known as the Leopard's Ascent.

"For many years now, gangs of antiquities robbers have been operating along the Judean Desert cliffs," Amir Ganor, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority's unit for the prevention of antiquities robbery, said in a statement. "The robbers attempt to locate and find the Dead Sea Scrolls, pieces of ancient texts and unique artifacts that were left in the caves." The artifacts are then sold for large sums of money in Israel and around the world, he added. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

Members of the Israeli police force's search-and-rescue team were recently undergoing routine training on the cliffs when they noticed movement in a nearby cave. The team reported the incident to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which placed the cave under surveillance.

Not long after, the suspected robbers were observed again, equipped with metal detectors and other excavation equipment. Upon leaving the cave, the looters were immediately apprehended by Israeli officials, who confiscated several ancient artifacts, including a 2,000-year-old lice comb from the Roman period.

The gang of looters indicted yesterday is one of the main criminal groups operating out of the Judean Desert, according to Israeli officials. In addition to the rock-climbing gear used to reach the looted cave, the alleged criminals were found in possession of excavation tools — so-called break-in equipment, metal detectors, lighting equipment and enough food and water to last several days.

Using this gear, the looters caused excessive damage in a cave known in archaeological circles as the"Cave of the Skulls," destroying historical evidence that dates as far back as the Chalcolithic period, about 5,000 years ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

"What makes the Judean Desert so unique is its dry climate that enable[s] the preservation of rare leather, bone and wooden objects, including the Judean Desert Scrolls, pieces of parchment and papyruson which various texts were written, among them the Holy Scriptures, books of the Bible, legal contracts and historical stories," Ganor said.

The Judean Desert Scrolls, more commonly known as the Dead Sea scrolls, is a collection of texts discovered in the 1940s in a series of caves located in the northwest of the Judean Desert. Included in the texts were copies of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy. Archaeologists have also found other ancient scrolls in the region, some of which date back 2,000 years.

Keeping these artifacts out of the hands of looters has become a main priority of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The organization now conducts both open and covert surveillance of Judean Desert regions and tries to identify which caves are being targeted by looters. The recent apprehension and indictment of the artifact robbers mark the first time in decades that such criminals have been caught red-handed by authorities.

If the alleged cave robbers are found guilty, they could face up to five years in prison for excavating in antiquities sites without a license and destroying an antiquities site, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. Israeli officials are also investigating other suspects who may be linked to the looting and destruction of antiquities sites in the region.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

An archaeologist says he discovered nine tiny scrolls with biblical text from the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed, according to news reports.

The newfound scrolls, which date back to about 2,000 years ago, were hidden inside three leather tefillin cases, also known as phylacteries, traditionally carried by observant Jewish men, Italian news agency Ansa Mediterranean reported. These cases were first pulled out of the caves in the 1950s, but their contents apparently were not examined until now.

Starting in the 1940s, the remains of more than 900 manuscripts were found in 11 caves near the site of Qumran in the West Bank. This collection Hebrew Bible texts, which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, included copies of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy.

"'It's not every day that you get the chance to discover new manuscripts," archaeologist Yonatan Adler told Ansa Mediterranean. "It's very exciting."

The nine new documents have not been fully examined yet and it's not yet clear what's written in the text. Adler announced his findings at an international conference on Qumran and the Dead Sea Region at Lugano, Switzerland.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Holy Land archaeology

The "Holy Land" refers to modern-day Israel, the Palestinian Territories and, by some definitions, areas close to them. This part of the world is of great religious importance for Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In this gallery LiveScience takes a look at seven amazing archaeological discoveries made in the region, some very recently. The finds date from the Early Bronze Age (more than 4,000 years ago) up to the time the Byzantine Empire controlled the Holy Land, about 1,500 years ago.

Ketef Hinnom silver amulets

In 1979 two silver mini scrolls (actually amulets in antiquity) were discovered at Ketef Hinnom, an archaeological site that now has been incorporated into the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. Dating to around 2,600 years ago they are written in paleo-Hebrew and contain the oldest biblical passage that survives to present day, part of a priestly blessing found in Numbers 6:24-26. The amulets say that Yahweh is stronger than evil and a "rebuker of evil." Researchers think the amulets would have offered protection to those who wore them.

Khirbet Qeiyafa

Khirbet Qeiyafa flourished almost 3,000 years ago and is located about 19 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. A casemate city wall with two gates surrounds the 6-acre (2.3 hectares) settlement, and some researchers claim it is the biblical city of Sha'arayim. The site may also have played an important role during Israel's "United Monarchy" period and, in July 2013, researchers announced they had identified a structure more than 10,000 square feet (1,000 square meters) in size as a palace that may have been used by King David himself.

Massive 'Sea of Galilee' Structure

In 2013, researchers reported the discovery of a massive stone cairn beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Rising 32 feet (10 meters) off the seafloor the structure has a diameter of 230 feet (70 m), twice the size of the outer circle of tonehenge. It's estimated to weigh about 60,000 tons, heavier than most modern-day warships. Researchers think it may be more than 4,000 years old, dating to a time when the water levels of the sea were lower and a city called "Bet Yerah" or "Khirbet Kerak" stood a mile to the south of the structure. The purpose of the structure is unknown, but cairns, in some instances, were used to mark burials in the ancient world.

Sea of Galilee boat

In 1986 two amateur archaeologists, exploring the Sea of Galilee coast at a time when the water level was low, found the remains of a small wooden boat buried in sediment. Professional archaeologists soon excavated it and found it dates to around 2,000 years ago. That date has led some to refer to the remains as the "Jesus boat," although there is no evidence that Jesus or his apostles used this specific vessel. Recently archaeologists discovered a town dating back more than 2,000 years that was located on the shoreline where the boat was found.

Dead Sea Scrolls

A young shepherd named Muhammed Edh-Dhib first discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946 or 1947 near the site of Qumran in what is now the West Bank. Over the next decade, scientists and Bedouin would discover more than 900 manuscripts located in 11 caves. They include canonical works from the Hebrew Bible, including Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy. They also include calendars, hymns, psalms, apocryphal (non-canonical) biblical works and community rules. One scroll is made of copper and describes the location of buried treasure. The texts date from between roughly 200 B.C. up until about A.D. 70 when the Romans put down a revolt in Jerusalem and Qumran was abandoned. The authorship of the scrolls is a source of debate. A popular theory among scholars is that a monastic sect called the Essenes lived at Qumran, and they wrote and collected the texts.

Masada Fortress

First identified in 1838, the cliff-top fortress of Masada is located in Israel near the Dead Sea and was the site of a last stand during a rebellion against the Romans. A team led by archaeologist Yigael Yadin carried out the most intensive excavations there in the 1960s. Research reveals that King Herod (74 B.C.– 4 B.C.) built two palaces with support buildings surrounded by a wall, nearly a mile long, with 27 towers. The site would gain its greatest fame when, after a rebellion against the Romans was crushed in A.D. 70, a group called the Zealots occupied the fortress with 960 people and tried to hold it against a Roman army of about 9,000. In A.D. 73 or 74 the Romans succeeded in building a siege ramp up to the wall, and the remaining defenders decided to take their own lives rather than surrender.

Madaba Map

Discovered in a church in Madaba, Jordan, in 1884, the Madaba Map is the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land. Created in the form of a mosaic it dates to somewhere between A.D. 560-565 and originally showed an area that stretched from southern Syria to central Egypt. By the time it was discovered much of the map was already gone, however its remains include a detailed depiction of Jerusalem. "The bird's-eye view shows an oval-shaped walled city in the very center of the map with six gates and twenty-one towers, the colonnaded main thoroughfare … and thirty-six other identifiable public buildings, churches and monasteries," writes Jerome Mandel in an article published in the book "Trade, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia" (Routledge, 2000). At the time it was created the Byzantine Empire ruled the Holy Land.

A family that holds pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls is quietly offering pieces of the ancient documents for sale — a move that's causing a dustup among archaeologists and biblical historians.

First discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea in 1947, the animal-skin parchments are some of the oldest known versions of the Hebrew Bible, and are treasured as near-priceless documents, The Associated Press reports.

Institutions like Azusa Pacific University in California and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas have spent millions on fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

More fragments — some as small as a postage stamp — are quietly being sold on the international antiquities market by William Kando, whose family has kept portions of the scrolls in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland.

The sale of pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls has surprised many researchers, some of whom didn't even know there were portions still available. It has also outraged some Israeli government officials, who maintain the scrolls are cultural property of Israel.

"I told Kando many years ago, as far as I'm concerned, he can die with those scrolls," Amir Ganor, head of the Israeli antiquities anti-looting division, told the AP. "The scrolls' only address is the State of Israel."

Some experts believe more ancient documents may come to light from the many caves in the Dead Sea area. "I would not at all be surprised if more material were to be found," Lenny Wolfe, a Jerusalem manuscripts dealer, told the AP.

Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

The Cambridge Digital Library has just made available thousands of pages from fragile religious manuscripts for Internet users' perusal, including a 2,000-year-old copy of the 10 Commandments, known as the "Nash Papyrus."

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947, the "Nash Papyrus," also called "The Ten Commandments," was the oldest known manuscript containing a text from the Hebrew Bible. It gets its name from the Egyptologist Walter Llewellyn Nash who purchased the manuscript from an antiquities dealer in 1902.

The text is among several important religious documents that were made public in a series of high-quality zoom-friendly images by the Cambridge Digital Library, which draws on the British university's vast collection of manuscripts. [See Images of the Religious Texts]

"Because of their age and delicacy these manuscripts are seldom able to be viewed — and when they are displayed, we can only show one or two pages," university librarian Anne Jarvis said in a statement. "Now, through the generosity of the Polonsky Foundation, anyone with a connection to the Internet can select a work of interest, turn to any page of the manuscript, and explore it in extraordinary detail."

Leonard Polonsky, whose foundation has funded the project, added that he was "delighted to see such important materials being made freely available to the world."

Other texts posted include an ancient copy of the New Testament, called the "Codex Bezae," which contains all four Gospels (though the only complete one is the Gospel of Luke) and the Acts of the Apostles in both Greek and Latin. The Codex Bezae, thought to date from the late fourth or early fifth century, includes the oldest copy of the story of the adulterous woman (John 7.53-8.11). The phrase "let him who is without sin, cast the first stone" comes from that story.

The "Book of Deer" was also made available online. This pocket gospel book is about 6.2 inches (16 centimeters) tall and 4.3 inches (11 cm) wide and is generally dated to the first half of the 10th century. Its name comes from additions that were made to the text in Gaelic or Middle Irish, likely by someone in Deer in Aberdeenshire.

The digital collection also contains several thousand items from the world's largest set of medieval Jewish manuscripts. Called the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, the manuscript fragments were found in a storeroom in Egypt in the late 1890s and detail life in the Jewish community at Fustat, near Cairo.

Beyond texts with Jewish or Judeo-Christian significance, the online collection includes several very early fragments of the Quran, from the eigth or ninth centuries, and Sanskrit manuscripts covering all the major religious traditions of South Asia.

You can explore some of the library's ancient texts here: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/.

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Qumran Caves

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd unearthed the first of nearly 900 texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were found in a series of 11 caves near Qumran, Israel (shown here).

The Dead Sea

First excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s, the site of Qumran in Israel is mired in controversy. De Vaux believed that it was a monastic settlement used by the Essenes and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were composed here. More recent archaeological work has cast doubt on this idea. The new textile research may help resolve the debate.

Undecorated Scroll Wrapper

The new research shows that of the 200 textiles from Qumran all but four were originally used as clothing. They look plain and, in general, contain no decoration. This particular textile was later recycled for use as a scroll wrapper. The top has missing weft threads.

Bleached Textile

The people of Qumran went to a lot of trouble to keep their clothes as white as possible. This textile was actually bleached. Also all the textiles were made of linen even though wool was the more popular garment in Israel at the time.

Scroll Wrapper

This is one of only four textiles from Qumran that was created specifically for use as a scroll wrapper. The others were used initially as clothing. This textile has blue lines running through it, a stark contrast from the other, undecorated, textiles from Qumran.

Christmas Cave

This textile is from the Christmas Cave and is NOT related to the site at Qumran. The textiles from this cave are decorated in beautiful colors and many of them are made of wool. They stand in stark contrast to the undecorated, linen, textiles found at Qumran.

By the Numbers: Dead Sea Scrolls

Stats tell the tale. This table incorporates two of the caves from Qumran and compares them to other sites in Israel. All the textiles from Qumran are made of linen whereas other sites in ancient Israel have a mix of garments, including wool.

Plain Threads

A group of weft threads from Qumran. The textiles at the site are extremely plain and indicate that the Essenes did in fact live at Qumran and that at least some of the scrolls were written there.

The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.

The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration,  some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.

Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.

Iconic scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C. The scrolls contain a wide variety of writings including early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with hymns, calendars and psalms, among other works. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls]

Nearly 200 textiles were found in the same caves, along with a few examples from Qumran, the archaeological site close to the caves where the scrolls were hidden.

Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, compared the white-linen textiles found in the11 caves to examples found elsewhere in ancient Israel, publishing their results in the most recent issue of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries. 

A breakthrough in studying these remains was made in 2007 when a team of archaeologists was able to ascertain that colorful wool textiles found at a site to the south of Qumran, known as the Christmas Cave, were not related to the inhabitants of the site. This meant that Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.

They discovered that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel. They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars. [Photos of Dead Sea textiles]

Some of the textiles were bleached white and most of them lacked decoration, even though decoration is commonly seen in textiles from other sites in ancient Israel.

According to the researchers the finds suggest that the residents of Qumran dressed simply.

"They wanted to be different than the Roman world," Shamir told LiveScience in a telephone interview. "They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles."

The owners of the clothing likely were not poor, as only one of the textiles had a patch on it."This is very, very, important," Shamir said. "Patching is connected with [the] economic situation of the site."

Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, which was used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched. On the other hand "if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched," she said. With Qumran, "I think [economically] they were in the middle, but I'm sure they were not poor."

Robert Cargill, a professor at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about Qumran and has developed a virtual model of it. He said that archaeological evidence from the site, including coins and glassware, also suggests the inhabitants were not poor.

"Far from being poor monastics, I think there was wealth at Qumran, at least some form of wealth," Cargill said, arguing that trade was important at the site. "I think they made their own pottery and sold some of it, I think they bred animals and sold them, I think they made honey and sold it."

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel.

Qumran itself was first excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s. He came to the conclusion that the site was inhabited by a religious sect called the Essenes who wrote the scrolls and stored them in caves. Among the finds he made were water pools, which he believed were used for ritual bathing, and multiple inkwells found in a room that became known as the "scriptorium." Based on his excavations, scholars have estimated the population of the site at as high as 200.

More recent archaeological work, conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in A.D. 70.

Magen and Peleg found that the site came into existence around 100 B.C. as a military outpost used by the Hasmoneans, a Jewish kingdom that flourished in the area. After the Romans took over Judaea in 63 B.C. the site was abandoned and eventually was taken over by civilians who used it for pottery production. They found that the pools de Vaux discovered include a fine layer of potters' clay.

There are other ideas as well. Cargill argues that while Qumran started out as a fort it was later occupied by a sectarian group whose members were deeply concerned with ritual purity. "Whether or not they are the Essenes, that's a different question," he said. This group, much smaller than earlier estimates of 200 people, would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others, he argues.

Other groups, not part of the Qumran community, may also have been putting scrolls into the caves, Cargill said.

Can clothing solve the mystery?

The new clothing research may help to identify the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shamir told LiveScience that it is unlikely the scrolls were deposited in the caves by Roman refugees. If that were the case, the more-popular textile in ancient Israel, wool, would have been found in the caves along with other garments.

"If people run away from Jerusalem they would take all sorts of textiles with them, not only linen textiles," she said. "The people who ran away to the Cave of Letters, they took wool textiles with them."

Peleg, the archaeologist who co-led the recent archaeological work at Qumran, told LiveScience he disagrees with that assessment. He said he stands by the idea that there is no connection between Qumran and the scrolls stored in the caves.

"We must remember that almost all the textiles were found in the caves and not at the site. The main question is the connection between the site and the scrolls," Peleg wrote in an email. "I can find alternative explanations for the fact that scrolls were found with linen."

For instance, linen could have been chosen as scroll wrapping for religious reasons or perhaps priests were responsible for storing the scrolls and they wore linen clothing. "The clothes of the priests were made from linen," Peleg wrote.

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik say that the clothing found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves is similar to historical descriptions of the clothing of the Essenes, suggesting that they in fact lived at Qumran. They point to an ancient Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, who wrote that the Essenes "make a point of keeping a dry skin and always being dressed in white." (However, Josephus never said anything about the clothing being made of linen, Peleg points out.)

Josephusalso wrote that the Essenes were very frugal when it came to clothing and shared goods with each other.

"In their dress and deportment they resemble children under rigorous discipline. They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age. There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself ..."

(Translation from "Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings," Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, 1996.)

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik also point to another ancient writer, Philo of Alexandria, who wrote that the Essenes wore a common style of simple dress.

"And not only is their table in common but their clothes also. For in winter they have a stock of stout coats ready and in summer cheap vests, so that he who wishes may easily take any garment he likes, since what one has is held to belong to all and conversely what all have one has."

(Translation from the "Selected Writing of Philo of Alexandria," edited by Hans Lewy, 1965.)

Cargill said that the clothing is further evidence that there was a Jewish sectarian group living at Qumran.

"You do have evidence of a group that raised its own animals, pressed its own date honey, that appears to have worn distinctive clothes and made its own pottery, and followed its own calendar, at least a calendar different from the temple priesthood," he said. "Those are all signs of a sectarian group."

He also noted the presence of mikveh (ritual baths) at the site and the fact that the residents could make pottery that was ritually pure.

This group appears to have wanted to separate itself from the priests based at the temple in Jerusalem. "There is a congruency within many of the sectarian documents that appears to be consistent with a sectarian group that has separated itself from the temple priesthood in Jerusalem," Cargill said. 

According to Cargill's theory, the people of Qumran would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others. "Obviously they didn't write all of the scrolls," Cargill said. Dating indicates some of the scrolls were written before Qumran even existed. One unusual scroll, made of copper, may have been deposited after Qumran was abandoned in A.D. 70.

Cargill says it's possible that some of the scrolls may have been put in caves from people outside the community. If that's true, some of the textiles could also be from people outside of Qumran.

"[If] not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the responsibility of sectarians at Qumran then it would follow that not all of the textiles that are discovered in the caves are [the] product of a sect at Qumran," Cargill said.

Were there women at Qumran?

The new research may also shed light on who created the textiles.

The textiles are of high quality and, based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.

"This is very, very important, because this is connected to gender," Shamir said, "spinning is connected with women."

She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production. This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself. "Weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a production of women, [and] we don't find this item at Qumran."

It's like something out of "The Da Vinci Code": Hundreds of thousands of fragments from medieval religious scrolls are scattered across the globe. How will scholars put them back together?

The answer, according to scientists at Tel Aviv University, is to use computer software based on facial recognition technology. But instead of recognizing faces, this software recognizes fragments thought to be part of the same work. Then, the program virtually "glues" the pieces back together. 

This enables researchers to digitally join a collection of more than 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts, called the Cairo Genizah, found in the late 1800s in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. The Cairo Genizah texts date from the ninth to the 19th centuries, and they're dispersed amongst more than 70 libraries worldwide. Researchers will report on their progress in digitally reuniting the Cairo Genizah during the second week in November at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Barcelona.

Genizahs are storerooms for holy texts, which under Jewish law cannot be simply tossed in the garbage when they're worn out. The Cairo Genizah, however, also contains merchants' lists, divorce documents and even personal letters, a firsthand look at hundreds of years of history in the Middle East.

A non-profit organization, the Friedberg Genizah Project, is working to digitize the fragments of the Cairo Genizah. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv University computer scientists Lior Wolf and Nachum Dershowitz have the difficult task of joining the fragments into a continuous whole.

To do so, they developed a computer program that analyzes document handwriting, physical properties of the page, and even spacing between the lines of writing.

"Its big advantage is that it doesn't tire after examining thousands of fragments," Wolf said in a statement. The program has made 1,000 confirmed connections between fragments of the Cairo Genizah in the span of a few months, almost the same amount made in 100 years of human scholarship.

The researchers are now applying the same technology to fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of hundreds of text found along the Dead Sea in the 1950s.

"It's a more complicated challenge," Wolf said, referring to the Dead Sea Scrolls. "The fragments are for the most part much smaller, and many of the texts are very unique. These texts shed light on the beginnings of Christianity."

Wolf and Dershowitz's effort is part of a Google project using high-resolution photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to put these biblical texts online.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

The oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, are now online to everyone in the world with the aid of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Google.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written between the first and third centuries B.C. They were hidden in 11 caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Sea in 68 B.C. to protect them from approaching Roman armies. They were not unearthed again until 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd of the Ta'amra tribe threw a rock in a cave and realized something lay inside.

Most of the scrolls are parchment, or specially prepared animal skins, although some are papyrus. Most are written in Hebrew, although some are in Aramaic or Greek.

Since 1965, the scrolls have been on exhibit at the Israel Museum. They have offered critical insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem, including the birth of Christianity.

"They are of paramount importance among the touchstones of monotheistic world heritage," said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum.

Nearly all the books of the Hebrew Bible are present, with the exception of Nehemiah and Esther. Copies of works that are not part of the biblical canon were discovered as well — some of these had previously been known only in ancient translations, such as Tobit, Jubilees, and 1 Enoch, while others were completely new to researchers, such as the Genesis Apocryphon or the Temple Scroll. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls]  

"They are really foundation stones to modern Western thought in the Judeo-Christian world in the same way that the 'Mona Lisa' was to development of art," Snyder told LiveScience. "If you think of certain phrases that we all know, such as 'turning swords to plowshares,' meaning 'to not go to war anymore,' that comes from the Book of Isaiah, which we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls." [Science as Art: A Gallery]

Now, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, anyone can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls, the most complete of the eight the Israel Museum has in its collection. These five include the Great Isaiah Scroll, the only complete ancient copy of any biblical book in existence, and the Temple Scroll, the thinnest parchment scroll ever found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Snyder noted the museum has also digitized the other three scrolls, and is now working on making them available in an easily readable form.

"What we've just done with Google is to bring these treasures to as broad an audience worldwide as might possible be interested in tapping into them," Snyder said.

The project involves ultra-high-resolution photographs that include up to 1,200 megapixels in detail, nearly 200 times more than the average consumer digital camera. As such, viewers can see even the most minute features of the material they are written on. Readers can also click on the text and get an English translation, and leave a comment for others to see.

"All this was accomplished in just six months," Snyder said.

Google helped design the online experience for the scrolls. Their text is discoverable via Web search — hunting for phrases from the scrolls may surface in search results. For example, a search for "Dead Sea Scrolls 'In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow'" may reveal a link to Chapter 17: Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll.

"We hope one day to make all existing knowledge in historical archives and collections available to all, including putting additional Dead Sea Scroll documents online," said Yossi Matias, managing director of Google's research and development center in Israel.

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

Jesus Christ may be the most famous man who ever lived. But how do we know he did?

Most theological historians, Christian and non-Christian alike, believe that Jesus really did walk the Earth. They draw that conclusion from textual evidence in the Bible, however, rather than from the odd assortment of relics parading as physical evidence in churches all over Europe.

That's because, from fragments of text written on bits of parchment to overly abundant chips of wood allegedly salvaged from his crucifix, none of the physical evidence of Jesus' life and death hold up to scientific scrutiny.  [Who Was Jesus, the Man?]

Holy Hardware

In a documentary called "The Nails of the Cross," set to air April 20 on the History Channel, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici tells the story of two nails allegedly discovered in a 2,000-year-old tomb in Jerusalem. He presents circumstantial evidence that seems to suggest the rusty relics once nailed Jesus to the cross.

The tomb in which the nails were found is believed by some to be that of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who presides over the trial of Jesus in the New Testament.

"If you look at the whole story — historical, textual, archaeological — they all seem to point at these two nails being involved in a crucifixion," Jacobovici says in the film. "And since Caiaphas is only associated with Jesus' crucifixion, you put two and two together and they seem to imply that these are the nails."

In their coverage of the new film, Reuters reported that most experts and scholars they contacted dismissed the filmmaker's case as far-fetched and called it a publicity stunt.

It turns out publicity stunts abound when it comes to holy hardware. In 1911, English liturgical scholar Herbert Thurston counted all the nails that were at that time believed to have been used to crucify Jesus. Though only three or four nails (the exact number is up for debate) were supposed to have pinned Christ to the cross circa A.D. 30, in 1911, 30 holy nails were being venerated in treasuries across Europe.

In an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Thurston, a Jesuit himself, offered this explanation for the surplus in hardware: "Probably the majority began by professing to be facsimiles which had touched or contained filings from some other nail whose claim was more ancient. Without conscious fraud on the part of anyone, it is very easy for imitations in this way to come in a very brief space of time to be reputed originals."

Along similar lines, enough wood chips from the "True Cross" – the cross on which Jesus was crucified – are scattered across Europe to fill a ship, according to this famous remark by the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin: "There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places, there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big shipload. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it."

Biblical blankets

Perhaps the most famous religious relic in the world, the Shroud of Turin, is believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The 14-by-4-foot linen blanket, which bears the ghostly image of a man's body, has been worshipped by millions of pilgrims in a cathedral in Turin, Italy. But scientifically speaking, the Shroud of Turin is a fake.

Radiocarbon dating of the shroud has revealed that it does not date to the time of Christ but instead to the 14th century; coincidentally, that's when it first appeared in the historical record. In a document written in 1390, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis of France claimed the image of Jesus on the cloth was "cunningly painted," a fact "attested by the artist who painted it."

Today, the Catholic Church does not officially endorse the Shroud of Turin as authentic, though many of the faithful, including Pope Benedict, have indicated that they personally believe in its holiness.

A similar relic is the Sudarium of Oviedo, a blood-stained cloth that was supposedly wrapped around Christ's head when he died and which, since A.D. 718, has taken pride of place in a cathedral in Spain. Blood on the Sudarium is of type AB, common in the Middle East but not in Europe, leading many to believe it's the blood of Christ. However, according to Joe Nickell in his book "Relics of the Christ" (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) the Sudarium has been carbon dated numerous times to circa A.D. 695 – not long before it showed up in Oviedo.

Lead lies

Seventy metal books allegedly discovered in a cave in Jordan were hailed in recent weeks as the earliest Christian documents. Dating them to mere decades after Jesus' death, scholars called the "lead codices" (they're written in code and cast in lead) the most important discovery in archaeological history. Even BBC News stated: "Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history."

Christians took the books to be proof of the real-life existence of Jesus, because one page displayed an image of him. Nearby, a fragment of text reading "I shall walk uprightly" was interpreted by many as a reference to Jesus' resurrection — strong evidence that it actually happened, coming so soon after the fact.

But as Life’s Little Mysteries reported, the lead codices are fakes — a jumble of anachronistic dialects and borrowed images probably forged within the past 50 years. "The image they are saying is Christ is the sun god Helios from a coin that came from the island of Rhodes," Oxford archaeologist Peter Thonemann told the press. "There are also some nonsense inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek." The main scholar who had been backing their authenticity was later revealed to be a fringe thinker with no real credentials.

Fake Christian relics such as the codices are relatively common, said Kimberly Bowes, a Roman and Greek archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "Modern people's urge to find material evidence from the first two centuries of Christianity is much stronger than the actual evidence itself," Bowes told Life's Little Mysteries. "This is because the numbers of Christians from this period was incredibly small — probably less than 7,000 by A.D. 100 — and because they didn't distinguish themselves materially from their Jewish brethren."

Sacred scrolls

One of the most important archaeological finds that actually dates to the time of Jesus may or may not provide evidence of his existence, depending on who you ask. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a vast trove of parchment and papyrus documents found in a cave in Israel in the 1940s, were written sometime between 150 B.C. and A.D. 70. In one place, the scrolls refer to a “teacher of righteousness.” Some say that teacher is Jesus. Others argue that he could be anyone.

Christ's crown

Before Jesus was crucified, the Gospels say, Roman soldiers placed a crown of thorns on his head in a painful mockery of his sovereignty. Many Christians believe the thorny instrument of torture still exists today, albeit in pieces scattered across Europe. One near-complete crown is housed in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The documented history of Notre Dame's Crown of Thorns goes back at least 16 centuries — an impressive provenance — but it doesn't quite trace back to A.D. 30. Furthermore, as Nickell points out, Notre Dame's crown is a circlet of brush, and is completely devoid of thorns.

The Good Book itself

The best argument in favor of Jesus as a once-living person is, of course, the Holy Bible itself. The Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are thought by scholars to have been written by four of Christ's disciples in the decades after his crucifixion. There are still other Gospels, never canonized but written by near-contemporaries of Jesus all the same. Many details differ between the various accounts of his life and death, but there's also a great deal of overlap, and through centuries of careful analysis biblical scholars have arrived at a general profile of Jesus, the man.

"We do know some things about the historical Jesus — less than some Christians think, but more than some skeptics think,” said Marcus Borg, a preeminent Biblical scholar, author and retired professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University. “Though a few books have recently argued that Jesus never existed, the evidence that he did is persuasive to the vast majority of scholars, whether Christian or non-Christian.”

The following description, surmised from the Gospels, would be affirmed by most history scholars, Borg told LiveScience:

Jesus was born sometime just before 4 B.C. and grew up in Nazareth, a small village in Galilee, as part of the peasant class. Jesus' father was a carpenter and he became one, too, meaning that they had likely lost their agricultural land at some point. Jesus was raised Jewish and he remained deeply Jewish all of his life; he never intended to create a new religion. Rather, he saw himself as acting within Judaism.

He left Nazareth as an adult and met the prophet John, who baptized him. During his baptism, Jesus likely experienced some sort of divine vision. Shortly afterwards, he began his public preaching with the message that the world could be transformed into a "Kingdom of God." He became a noted teacher and prophet, as well as a healer: More healing stories are told about Jesus than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition.

He was executed by Roman imperial authority, and his followers experienced him after his death. It is clear, Borg said, that they had visions of Jesus as they had known him during his historical life. Only after his death did they declare Jesus to be "lord" or "the son of God."

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Contributing reporting by Heather Whipps.

Fierce warriors once occupied the famous complex where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, new research suggests. Ruins of the Qumran site—in the present-day West Bank—resemble a monastery, but scholars have argued over its uses before the religious sect who penned the scrolls moved in somewhere between 130 and 100 B.C. Using the world's first virtual 3-D reconstruction of the site, historians recently found evidence of a fortress that was later converted into its more peaceful, pious function. “Once you put all the archaeological evidence into three dimensions, the solution literally jumps out at you,” said William Schniedewind, chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies at UCLA and the project’s principle investigator. Clarification in virtual reality The Qumran gained legendary status in the archaeological world when a shepherd boy discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in nearby caves in 1947. After many investigations of the 20,000-square-foot residential complex where most of the scrolls are believed to have been written, archaeologists have debated the structural mish-mash of its buildings and spaces. Many, such as a defensive four-story tower, don't seem to belong to a setting used exclusively as a monastery. Other areas appeared as add-ons or renovations, such as a communal dining hall. With the 3-D model, the UCLA researchers deconstructed the complex piece by piece. That allowed them to "see" architectural elements invisible to the naked eye, said Schniedewind. "The various sizes of the walls and their ability to support weight (e.g., necessary for multi-story construction/fortification) was not immediately clear in the archaeological plan," he said. “Once we put the dining hall into the model, we realized it had to be an addition,” noted UCLA graduate student and project co-author Bob Cargill. “It only fits to the south of the original structure.” Add-ons like the dining hall were all rooms meant for communal living, while the underbelly of the structure–-built first and revealed in the virtual model–-had more militaristic functions, the researchers found. During its period as a fort, the first extended occupation of Qumran was probably by a band of mighty warriors called the Hasmoneans, whose victory over Greek occupiers is celebrated during Hanukkah, the UCLA historians contend. Monks sought peace in the desert It is widely believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the only surviving texts of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) written before 100 A.D., were rushed from the Qumran compound and hidden in the caves during an encroachment of Roman troops in 66 A.D. Before the attack, the Qumran was a peaceful place of worship where the Essenes, a strict religious group who moved there from Jerusalem, painstakingly copied and scribed the scrolls. "The site was chosen because the wilderness was a place that people went to seek God--indeed, this was the reason that the Dead Sea Scrolls give for choosing a desert site for this settlement," Schniedewind told LiveScience. Essene monks observed a regimented life of ritual while they lived at the Qumran. The new findings support the theory that the building had at least a few occupants prior to the Essenes, among them—some historians have suggested—an aristocratic family from Jerusalem who used the building as a vacation home. It makes sense, said Schniedewind, given the limit of practical places to live in that part of the world. "There are very few possible places that could be settled in the Judean desert. So, everyone who settles there tends to choose the same places," Schniedewind said. "Specifically, there are very few viable water sources. The site of Qumran … allowed the collection of runoff using dams, aqueducts and pools."

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