The Jordan Museum

The Copper Scroll is the one Dead Sea Scroll found in place by an archaeological team rather than brought in by Bedouin, which is rare in this corpus and makes its find context secure. It came out of the cave in two rolls, corroded so hard that unrolling them would have shattered the metal.

Reading it took three years of argument about method and then a decision that cannot be undone. The scroll was sent to the Manchester College of Technology, where in 1955 and 1956 Professor H. Wright Baker cut it into twenty three longitudinal strips on a saw built for the purpose. That is how the text was recovered and why the object can never be rolled again, and the strips are what a visitor sees today. It has since been cleaned, cast and imaged at high resolution.

The text itself is unlike anything else in the corpus. It is neither scripture nor the rule of a community but a list of places where gold and silver were said to be hidden, with quantities attached. Whether it records real deposits, a temple treasury dispersed in a hurry, or something else entirely is still argued, and the readings of individual place names are argued along with it.

The scroll went first to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem, and then to Amman, where this museum holds it. That journey is short to describe and is the subject of the second article here, because it is not a simple change of address.

The scrolls now in Amman and the scrolls now in Jerusalem were once one collection in one building. The Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem held the material excavated from the Qumran caves through the 1950s. Jordan administered East Jerusalem at the time, nationalised the museum in 1966, and lost control of it in the war of 1967. Part of the collection had already been moved to Amman. The rest has been in Israeli hands since.

Everything that should follow from that is contested, and the atlas does not settle it. Jordan has asked for the return of material held in Jerusalem. Israel holds it and treats its custody as lawful. Palestinian claims have been made as well. The legal arguments turn on the law of occupation, on the standing of a nationalisation carried out by an administering power, and on whether antiquities of this kind are the cultural property of a state or of a people, and specialists disagree about each of those in turn. There is no neutral vocabulary for the dispute, which is itself part of why it persists.

What this atlas records is narrower and checkable. This museum holds the Copper Scroll and a substantial part of the material excavated before 1967. It does not record that any party is entitled to what another party holds, because that is not a question a reference work can answer on a reader's behalf. A reader who wants the argument should go to the parties and to the legal literature rather than take a position from an encyclopedia entry.