Writing Materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls

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The first manuscripts from the Qumran caves were found in 1947. Within the following 10 years, clandestine and legal excavations revealed some 900 highly fragmented manuscripts from the late Second Temple period. This collection is generally known as Scrolls of the Judea Desert or Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS).

For many years after their discovery, text analysis and fragments attribution were the main concern of the scholars dealing with the scrolls. The uncertain archaeological provenance of the larger part of the collection added an additional difficulty to the formidable task of sorting some 19000 fragments. After 60 years of scholar research the questions of origin, archaeological provenance and correct attribution of the fragments are still hotly debated.

To determine a possible contribution to the debate from the point of view of writing materials, we used optical and electron microscopy, various X-ray based techniques as well as vibrational spectroscopy. We validated our approach with SY- based studies using the advantages of the synchrotron radiation source with respect to the benchtop devices.

Our laboratory studies showed that often production and storage locality could be distinguished thanks to the specific residues (“fingerprint”) they left on the material. Moreover, we have discovered that different parchment production processes coexisted in the antiquity, and the resulting writing materials can readily be distinguished.