The 2,200 - year - old Dead Sea Scrolls , get in the Qumran Caves and in other placement nearby , were first found 70 age ago by a ring of sheepherder . The 981 manuscripts are comprised of – among other thing – some of the honest-to-god versions of parts of the Hebrew Bible and , separately , parts of the Christian Old Testament .
Providing a hefty window into the past tense , these scrolls have incredible religious and diachronic import , but their authorship has remain a mystery ever since they were see . refreshing research represent at the yearly meeting of theAmerican Schools of Oriental Researchin Boston , however , may have lastly revealed who the original writers were .
They do n’t appear to have died from wound , which means that are improbable to be soldier . These facts , along with the location of burial and the history of the region at the time , suggest that they were part of a monastery or religious order .
As it so happen , one of the hypothesis as to the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls focuses on the Essenes , an ancient Judaic faction that flourished from 200 BCE to around 100 CE . This little male community dedicated themselves to a living of piety , voluntary impoverishment , and sensual restriction .
They were first cite by the romish polymath Pliny the older in his magnum opus , lifelike History . In it , he places them as being located in Ein Gedi , right next to the Dead Sea , and right where the ringlet were eventually situate .
minutely , they ’ve been linked to the composition of the gyre before – and these newly excavated skeletons add a lot of weight to this theory . It ’s look in all likelihood that the Essenes are by far the honest candidates to escort .
One of the cave at Qumran contain the original Dead Sea Scroll fragments . Effi Schweizer / Wikimedia Commons ; Public Domain
Anthropologist Yossi Nagar toldScience Newsthat “ the high-pitched density of grownup males of various geezerhood buried at Qumran is similar to what has been found at burying ground connected to knotty monastery . ”
The Byzantine Empire egress a few hundred after the Dead Sea Scrolls , but it ’s almost sure that the practices and feature of it – include its monasteries – come forth bit by bit before then . Considering the Empire ’s domain included what is now parts of Israel , it seems probable that the bury men were part of a Jewish monastic clan of sorts .
The skeleton do n’t offer any sort of smoking triggerman , and the squad openly recognize this . Still , they ’ve add a compelling newfangled piece to the mystifier that may have get us closer to the truth than ever before .
