New Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments Found in Judean Desert

Philippe Bohstrom Dec 21, 2016 1:36 PM
 

New fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been found in the Cave of the Skulls by the Dead Sea in Israel, in a salvage excavation by Israeli authorities. The pieces are small and the writing on them is too faded to make out without advanced analysis. At this stage the archaeologists aren't even sure if they're written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic or another language.

“The most important thing that can come out of these fragments is if we can connect them with other documents that were looted from the Judean Desert, and that have no known provenance," says Dr. Uri Davidovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, among the scientists investigating the caves.

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd tossing a stone into a cave in the vicinity of Qumran heard the sound of an earthenware jar cracking, which led to what some have called the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Upon crawling inside, he found the first of what came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Cave of the Skulls, named for seven human skulls and other skeletal remains, discovered by Prof. Yohanan Aharoni in 1960, is part of the Large Cave Complex, a series of naturally occurring spaces atop a steep cliff on the northern bank of Tze'elim Stream, in the southern part of the desert. The site is in one of the starkest areas of the Judean Desert.      More