[Faline]

Five of the most important Dead Sea Scrolls are now available to view online - some 2,000 years after they were written.

In a project launched by Israel's national museum and Google, the scrolls can now be viewed in ultra-high resolution on the internet, decades after they were discovered.
The scrolls now online include the biblical Book of Isaiah and the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll.
Web users can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English.
The originals are kept in a secured vault in a Jerusalem building constructed specifically to house the scrolls.



Access requires at least three different keys, a magnetic card and a secret code.
The texts are written mainly on papyrus or parchment and in some cases only small fragments remain.
The five scrolls are among those purchased by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers, having first been found by Bedouin shepherds in the Judean Desert.
The scrolls are considered by many to be the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century.



It is widely believed they were written or collected by a Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea.
The hundreds of manuscripts that survived, partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light on the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity.
The most complete scrolls are held by the Israel Museum, with more pieces and smaller fragments found in other institutions and private collections.
Tens of thousands of fragments from 900 Dead Sea manuscripts are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has separately begun its own project to put them online in conjunction with Google.
Photography work on the project began earlier this month in conjunction with a former Nasa scientist.

To view the scrolls click the website here:

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/

[**butterflylove**]

cl

[Faline]

I had a really good gander at these last night

[Faline]

It has been debated for centuries, but scholars think they are one step closer to discovering who wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls.
The world's oldest known biblical documents may have been penned by a sect called the Essenes, according to scholars who studied material discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank.
Scholars previously believed the 2,000-year-old scrolls were written by a Jewish sect from Qumran in the Judean Desert and were hidden in the caves around 70AD, when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
But this new research says that all the textiles are made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C.
Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, published their research comparing materials in journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

Orit Shamir and Naama Sukenik looked at the materials of the scrolls discovered in Qumran:


The pair compared the white-linen textiles found in the caves to other found elsewhere in ancient Israel, and they discovered some parts are being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours, Live Science reports.
But not everyone agrees with their diagnosis.
Some believe the linen used could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.
Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.
They unearthed that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel.

The scholars examined scrolls, similar to the one pictured, and say the plain material is the clue which gives away the authors of the documents:


They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars.
'They wanted to be different than the Roman world,' Shamir told LiveScience.
'They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles.'
'This is very, very, important,' Shamir said. 'Patching is connected with [the] economic situation of the site.'

Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched.
On the other hand 'if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched,' she said.
The textiles are of high quality and, based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.
She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production.
This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself as weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a done women.

The first fragments of the scrolls - seen inside the vault of the Shrine of the Book building at the Israel Museum - were reportedly sold for under £10 by the shepherds who found them. Their value to scholars is incalculable:

[secretsandlies]

All these pieces of a history that , if , and when we are ALLOWED to connect the dots , most people won't be able to wrap thier heads around who we "really" are as a race and "who" or "what" created us....each day we get a little closer to the truth.