Scientists Crack the Cryptic Code of a 2000-Year-Old Dead Sea Scroll

Decades after they were first discovered, the Dead Sea Scrolls continue to yield new information about centuries-old religious practices. As The Telegraph reports, Israeli researchers pieced together and translated more than 60 parchment fragments to reconstitute one of the last unread scrolls from the original cache, which was written between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE.

Experts originally thought that the tattered parchment pieces—some smaller than one square centimeter—came from a number of different scrolls. But in 2017, scholars from Haifa University's Bible studies department began studying the snippets of text and realized they belonged to the same document.

According to the BBC, the newly deciphered scroll references a 364-day calendar that the writers followed. It also mentions no-longer-practiced festivals that marked the transition between seasons, and includes clarifying annotations made by a second writer or editor.

The text was written in code, researchers say, and the corrective notes helped them decipher the writings. The information in the text was well known when the scroll was composed, so the writer probably used the cryptic language to signal his elite status.

"This practice is also found in many places outside the Land of Israel, where leaders write in secret code even when discussing universally known matters, as a reflection of their status. The custom was intended to show that the author was familiar with the code, while others were not," researchers said in a statement.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves at the Qumran archaeological site in the West Bank, near the Dead Sea, between the late 1940s and the late 1950s. Fragments from more than 900 manuscripts were recovered, written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Among them were a selection of the Hebrew Bible's earliest-known writings and the oldest surviving version of the Ten Commandments.

Experts don't know for sure who wrote the scrolls, but one widely held theory is that a Jewish sect called the Essenes, which lived in the Judean desert near the Qumran caves, was responsible. We may learn more soon: A recent report in LiveScience recounts that archaeologists are currently excavating a newly discovered Qumran cave where a blank scroll was found in 2017. 

[h/t The Telegraph]