#temple scroll

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.

Decades after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in desert caves, the ancient manuscripts are still offering surprises.

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.

It’s not yet clear how the mineral coating may have contributed to the Temple Scroll’s striking appearance, says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at MIT. But understanding the properties of this manuscript and others like it could inform strategies for preserving these 2,000-year-old documents, which include sections of the Hebrew Bible, as well as help in spotting forgeries.

Masic and colleagues scrutinized a small fragment of the Temple Scroll using X-ray and Raman spectroscopy. These techniques involve shining radiation on a sample and measuring the light that emanates back out to map the material’s chemical composition.  

Using X-ray and Raman spectroscopy to examine a fragment of the Temple Scroll (two views shown), scientists identified a strange salt coating on the text side of the scroll that hasn’t been found on other Dead Sea Scrolls. CREDIT: R. SCHEUTZ ET AL/SCI. ADV. 2019

“This surprise came out, of salts that we weren’t expecting to find at all,” Masic says. The mixture atop the Temple Scroll mostly comprises sulfate salts, including minerals like gypsum, glauberite and thenardite, not previously seen on the Dead Sea Scrolls (SN: 11/17/17). “Sometimes you find a lot of inorganic components on these scrolls or fragments, and they probably came from the caves,” Masic says. But since the minerals on the Temple Scroll aren’t generally found in the region around the Dead Sea, it’s more likely that these materials were used in the scroll’s production, the researchers conclude.