The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an ancient manufacturing practice
Name
sciadv.aaw7494.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.18 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7d7c95c4c7337e4301860632862f15d9
Author(s)
Schuetz, Roman
Maragh, Janille M
Weaver, James C
Rabin, Ira
Masic, Admir
Date Issued
August 2019
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Schuetz, Roman, Maragh, Janille M, Weaver, James C, Rabin, Ira and Masic, Admir. 2019. "The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an ancient manufacturing practice." Science Advances, 5 (9).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). The miraculously preserved 2000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts of invaluable historical significance, were discovered in the mid-20th century in the caves of the Judean desert. The texts were mainly written on parchment and exhibit vast diversity in their states of preservation. One particular scroll, the 8-m-long Temple Scroll is especially notable because of its exceptional thinness and bright ivory color. The parchment has a layered structure, consisting of a collagenous base material and an atypical inorganic overlayer. We analyzed the chemistry of the inorganic layer using x-ray and Raman spectroscopies and discovered a variety of evaporitic sulfate salts. This points toward a unique ancient production technology in which the parchment was modified through the addition of the inorganic layer as a writing surface. Furthermore, understanding the properties of these minerals is particularly critical for the development of suitable conservation methods for the preservation of these invaluable historical documents.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIADV.AAW7494
