University of Manchester
Posted on 05/19/2020 9:27:24 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Unlike the recent cases of forgeries assumed to be Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, all of these small pieces were unearthed in the official excavations of the Qumran caves, and were never passed through the antiquities market.
In the 1950s, the fragments were gifted by the Jordanian government to Ronald Reed, leather expert at the University of Leeds, so he could study their physical and chemical composition. It was assumed that the pieces were ideal for scientific tests, as they were blank and relatively worthless. These were studied and published by Reed and his student John Poole, and then stored safely away.
In 1997 the Reed Collection was donated to The University of Manchester through the initiative of Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis, George Brooke. These fragments have been stored in Reed's own labelled boxes in The John Rylands Library, and have been relatively untouched since then.
When examining the fragments for the new study, Professor Taylor thought it possible that one of them did actually contain a letter, and therefore decided to photograph all of the existing fragments over 1 cm that appear blank to the naked eye, using multispectral imaging.
51 fragments were imaged front and back. Six were identified for further detailed investigation - of these, it was established that four have readable Hebrew/Aramaic text written in carbon-based ink. The study has also revealed ruled lines and small vestiges of letters on other fragments.
The most substantial fragment has the remains of four lines of text with 15-16 letters, most of which are only partially preserved, but the word Shabbat (Sabbath) can be clearly read. This text (pictured) may be related to the biblical book of Ezekiel (46:1-3).
(Excerpt) Read more at manchester.ac.uk ...
D...R...I...N...K......Y...O...U...R......O...V...A...L...T...I...N...E...
kind of a beautiful connection with the past. how appropriate that the one word visible is sabbath
The fragments are a wonderful symbol of our fragmentary knowledge. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle that we puzzle about because we don’t have the original picture. Each new discovery leads to a new discovery in our thinking. Of course there can be duplication as there are duplication in all our written text. It is a rare find that we have such a rare find in our trove of ancient texts and sources.
It would have been nice if more fragments had writing -- not that there may not be advances in this multispectral technology -- and if there were longer sentence fragments on the other five that showed writing, but regardless of that, they've done well.
Maybe other fragments that had writing will be found to have more.
‘There once was a man from Nantucket........’
B...U...R...M...A...-...S...H...A... (text incomplete?)
“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”
:oO
Wowser!
I just started reading “The Dead Sea Scrolls” again, so this is exciting!
‘Face
Who knew they had invisible ink back then?
“B...A...T...B...O.....”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bO06kuhFCsztbcx0Z8-tiX2PyQMy2nP-/view?usp=drivesdk
10% off at Abe Kline’s!
Bfl
So what?
I have the dead sea scrolls tattooed on my upper back.
That statement pretty much applies to all of human history prior to the 19th century
I'm just glad that the History Channel wasn't around at the time of the discovery, or they'd A) have named the show "Dead Sea Scrolls - Live" and B) still be working on the excavation, but having nothing to show us so far.
I gave up on the History Channel when I decided it should have been named the Distortion Channel. No wonder people don’t know anything about history, if they get any information from the History Channel. Is it owned, like the Discovery Channel, by those good folks at CNN? *p-TOOIE*
‘face
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