'But the Cave Four material wasn't published until 1968, and then only a small amount of it. By that stage Father de Vaux seemed to have decided that his lasting legacy would be to deny access to the scrolls to all other scholars, and he imposed a strict secrecy rule that allowed only members of his original team or their specific designates to work on them. De Vaux died in 1971, but his death changed nothing: scholars still had no access to the Cave Four material, or even to photographs of the scrolls. That lasted until 1991 – almost half a century after their discovery – when a complete set of photographs of the Cave Four materials was found, almost by accident, in a library in San Marino, California, and subsequently published.'
'But if the Essenes – or whoever lived at Qumran – didn't write the scrolls, who did?' Bronson asked.
'Nobody knows. The most probable explanation is that they originated with some devout religious sect in Jerusalem, and were hidden in the Qumran caves by a group of Jews fleeing from Roman troops during one of the regular periods of political unrest.'
'And exactly what's in them?' Bronson asked.
'Most of them are scribal copies of known literary texts, mainly Old Testament biblical material, but obviously much earlier examples than had been previously available. There are thirty-odd copies of Deuteronomy, for example. There are also a lot of secular texts, most previously unknown, which shed new light on the form of Judaism that was practised during what's known as the Second Temple period. That was when the Temple in Jerusalem had been reconstructed after the original – Solomon's Temple – was destroyed in 586 BC. The Second Temple period ran from 516 BC until AD 70, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and ended the Great Jewish Revolt that had started four years earlier.
'And the Copper Scroll,' Angela finished, 'is completely out of whack with everything else that was found at Qumran. In 1952, an expedition sponsored by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities was working in Cave Three and found a unique object designated 3Q15 – that simply means it was the fifteenth relic found in Cave Three at Qumran. It was a thin sheet of almost pure copper, some seven feet in length, which had apparently snapped in two when it was being rolled up by whoever had prepared it. After two thousand years in the cave, the metal was badly oxidized, incredibly brittle and fragile, and clearly couldn't simply be unrolled. It was unlike anything anyone had seen before, at Qumran or anywhere else, because of both its size – it was the biggest piece of ancient text ever known to have been recorded on metal – and its contents.
'The problem the archaeologists had was deciding how to open it. They spent nearly five years looking at the scroll before they came to a decision, and then they did the wrong thing. They sent it to the Manchester College of Technology where it was sawn in half lengthways using a very thin blade. That opened up the scroll completely and gave the researchers a series of curved sections of copper that they could study. Unfortunately, the Manchester people – and almost everyone else – failed to notice two things about the scroll.
'When it was discovered, the spaces between the sheets of rolled copper were filled with a hard-packed material, almost like fired clay. This was assumed to be nothing more than an accumulation of dust and debris over the millennia, but it wasn't. Nobody thought to check the conditions in the cave at Qumran where it was found. If they had, they'd have discovered that the soil in those caves was a very fine dust, almost a powder, which contains no silicon that would allow it to solidify. Even if the soil is dampened, it simply returns to powder when it dries out. Whoever had written the scroll had covered one side with a layer of clay before rolling it. And then they had fired it in a kiln to turn the clay into something almost as hard as pottery.'
'Why? To protect the copper?'
'Oddly enough, most likely exactly the opposite. Most researchers now believe that the authors of the Copper Scroll expected the metal to corrode away, and their intention was to leave the text of the scroll imprinted on the clay. That was the other thing the Manchester team failed to register.
'The scroll is primarily written in Mishnaic Hebrew with a handful of Greek letters whose purpose and meaning is still unknown. In fact, there are fourteen Greek letters on the scroll, and the first ten of them spell out the name "Akhenaten". He was a pharaoh who ruled Egypt in about 1,350 BC, and his main claim to fame is that he founded what was probably the world's first monotheistic religion. But the Copper Scroll dates from at least a millennium later than this, so why his name is on it remains a complete mystery.'
'Why did the authors of the scroll go to such trouble?'
'Probably,' Angela said, 'because of the contents. It looks as though they wanted to make certain that the record would survive for as long as possible, much longer than a papyrus scroll might, for example. And the reason for their determination was because almost all that's on the Copper Scroll is a list of treasure, possibly that of the First Temple in Jerusalem and, if the quantities listed are correct, today it would be worth in excess of two billion pounds.'
50
'So the Copper Scroll's really a treasure map, then?' Bronson asked.
'No, not a map, exactly. It's a list of sixty-four locations, sixty-three of which are supposed to be where large amounts – sometimes tonnes – of gold and silver are hidden. The sixty-fourth listing gives the location of a duplicate document that apparently provides additional details of the treasure and where it's been hidden. Some people think this might be what's become known as the Silver Scroll.
'The only snag with that is that nobody has any idea if the Silver Scroll exists or, if it does, where it might be found. The location given in the Copper Scroll simply says that the supporting document is to be found "In the pit, adjoining on the north, in a hole opening northwards, and buried at its mouth", which is hardly what you'd call a precise location.'
'So what happened to the Copper Scroll?' Bronson asked.
'When Father de Vaux found out about it, he realized immediately that it was a flat contradiction of everything that he and his team had been proposing. An ascetic religious community could hardly be the custodians of – if the figures have been translated correctly – some twentysix tonnes of gold and sixty-five tonnes of silver. So he did what academics and scientists usually do when presented with hard evidence that conflicts with their own cosy little world view. He declared that the Copper Scroll was a hoax, a forgery or a joke.
'None of these suggestions was convincing. If it wasn't a genuine document, you have to ask why the creators of the scroll went to so much trouble when they made it – I mean, why would they bother? Though we don't know a hell of a lot about any of the communities that existed in Judea during this period, it's never been suggested that any of them were great practical jokers. Even if they had been, why would they go to so much trouble to produce the scroll, and then hide it away in a remote cave where nobody would be likely to find it for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years? Don't forget, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found entirely by accident.
'But the real point is that the listing on the Copper Scroll is just that – a listing. Each item is recorded, with its location, but without any embellishment. It reads like an inventory of goods, nothing more, and that does give it a kind of authentic feeling.'
'And these people in Manchester just cut the thing in two?' Bronson said.
'Exactly. They failed to appreciate that the clay was at least as important as the copper and removed it as the first step. I don't know how they did it, but whatever technique they used also damaged the copper, so it was a kind of double-whammy. They'd probably have done better to leave the clay alone and remove the metal piece by piece. Instead, they coated the outside of the scroll in a strong adhesive and cut lengthways down it with a very thin sawblade. That resulted in a couple of dozen curved sections of copper that the researchers could then start translating, but of course the very act of cutting the metal partially destroyed some of the text.'