“     In 1947 a young Bedouin shepherd wandering the rocky Qumran plateau in what is now the West Bank stumbled upon a cave which looked as if no-one had entered it in years. His explorations yielded no treasures, to his dismay. He spotted a few clay jars filled with old parchments, but he was illiterate and had no use for documents, especially such old ones. He could not have known that he had discovered over 2,000-year-old scrolls containing, among other writings, the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible—the founding scriptures of western civilisation.
 
The Dead Sea Scrolls—so named because the 11 caves where they were found sit a mile inland from the north shore of the Dead Sea—are a collection of 972 texts written between roughly 200 BCE and 70 CE, during the time of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christianity. According to a popular theory, a group of people hid the scrolls in the Qumran caves to preserve that vast library of religious and secular texts from the approaching Romans, prior to the fall of Jerusalem. The shepherd found them by accident two millennia later, and a French Dominican priest named Roland de Vaux collected and analysed them.” continue reading | Prospero