The Dead Sea Scrolls are still showing us new things, even after half a Century of study!

The dead sea scrolls are back in the news with new lab data, after over fifty years of study:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw7494
New lab work is showing a new side to these ancient texts.

Truth can be amazing some times, the Dead Sea Scrolls are still showing us information on our ancestors that are surprising, and enrich our understanding of their abilities! They were advanced enough to use animal skin to send us a message over twenty centuries in the future. Not too bad for a bunch of goat herders....

Ancient texts, known collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), were discovered in the middle of the last century and are certainly some of the most treasured objects of cultural heritage. The DSS were miraculously preserved in the natural limestone and man-made marl caves of the Judean desert, and the main collections are held in the Israel Antiquity Authority, the Shrine of the Book, and Jordan. Apart from having inherent textual value, the DSS also carry historical information related to the materials processing technologies that were used to produce them. A detailed understanding of these ancient technologies could be used for forgery identification purposes and for the development of modern antiquity-inspired, collagen-based materials

They were using all the then current science (east and west) known; to fight to preserve these texts! After over twenty centuries, it looks like they made it work. We still have these scrolls, so they did something right.

This new science will help in preserving the scrolls we have, and will help them move into the future.

Image from Article:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/longest-dead-sea-scroll-sports-salt-finish-that-others-lack?utm_source=Editors_Picks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorspicks090819

Article on the Dead Sea Scrolls:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/longest-dead-sea-scroll-sports-salt-finish-that-others-lack?utm_source=Editors_Picks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorspicks090819

The longest scroll was unusually bright, and had a different salt coating that appears to have preserved it better. It is important to understand this process to help in the preservation of this scroll. There was an incredible amount of work and love that appears to have gone into this process, we have a responsibility to do our best to preserve them!

Chemical analysis of the Temple Scroll, the longest of the scrolls, has revealed a salty coating on the text side of the scroll that hasn’t been previously found on the others. This unusual finish suggests that the Temple Scroll’s remarkably bright parchment was manufactured differently from other documents in the collection, researchers report online September 6 in Science Advances.

Science can give us valuable insight that can be used to save important parts of our History. They were not stupid way back when, but they may have been surprised at how long what they wrote lasted!

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