Archaeologists Discover Additional Dead Sea Scroll Fragments In Desert Caves

A four-year effort by Israeli archaeologists searched 500 caves near the Dead Sea. In addition to ancient parchments and papyri, they found an intricately woven basket more than 10,000 years old.

Transcript

NOEL KING, HOST:

Israeli archaeologists have found tiny fragments of an ancient biblical scroll. Admittedly, that's a hard one to follow, but here goes - they also think they have found the world's oldest intact basket. Here's NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem.

DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: The Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest-known copies of biblical texts, written more than 2,000 years ago and discovered in desert caves along the Dead Sea starting in the 1940s and '50s. Now Israeli government archaeologists say they've found more fragments.

OREN ABLEMAN: For the first time in over 60 years, we have biblical fragments that were discovered in an excavation and brought directly here to our conservation lab.

ESTRIN: Oren Ableman of the Israel Antiquities Authority. It was a race against looters. An ancient papyrus found by antiquities hunters in the area tipped off officials that more scrolls could still be hidden in the caves. For the last four years, Israeli archaeologists rappelled down desert cliffs and searched nearly all of the approximately 500 known caves along the shore of the Dead Sea. In one cave in Israel, they found a bundle of tiny, crumpled parchment pieces in ancient Greek.

ABLEMAN: When we deciphered it, turned out to be Zechariah 8:16-17.

ESTRIN: The verse reads, render truth and justice in your gates.

ABLEMAN: Now, something very surprising that we found in this fragment was that the last word on Verse 16, justice in your gates, instead of the word gates, we have the word streets here.

ESTRIN: He thinks it could be a copying error. In the time of the biblical prophets, trials were carried out at the gates of a city, but when the scribe wrote this Greek translation hundreds of years later in the first century B.C., he may have been used to seeing trials carried out in city streets. Everything's written in ancient Greek, except for one word.

ABLEMAN: Right there.

ESTRIN: He and a conservator wearing blue gloves point to the four-letter name of God in ancient Hebrew.

ABLEMAN: That's - kind of tell us a bit about the importance of the name of God, that even in a text that is translated into Greek, the name of God is still in the ancient Hebrew script, probably part of way of showing how holy the name is.

ESTRIN: The archaeologists found even older artifacts.

CHAIM COHEN: The most exciting thing that we found in my opinion, that we found in the project - (laughter).

ESTRIN: Archaeologist Chaim Cohen displays a huge, intricately woven basket, about 10,500 years old, completely intact, and found buried in another Dead Sea cave in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. What did the basket used to store? Researchers are studying some dirt at the bottom of the basket to try to solve that mystery.

Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Jerusalem.

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