MIT News – Study of Dead Sea Scroll sheds light on a lost ancient parchment-making technology. “First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found. Now, a study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere elucidates a unique ancient technology for parchment making and provides new insights into possible methods to better preserve these precious historical documents.The study focused on one scroll in particular, known as the Temple Scroll, among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery. The scrolls were found in jars hidden in 11 caves on the steep hillsides just north of the Dead Sea, in the region around the ancient settlement of Qumran, which was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago. The Temple Scroll is one of the largest (almost 25 feet long) and best-preserved of all the scrolls, even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250 of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. These properties led Admir Masic, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty fellow in archaeological materials, and his collaborators to wonder how the parchment was made. The results of that study, carried out with former doctoral student Roman Schuetz (now at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science), MIT graduate student Janille Maragh, James Weaver from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and Ira Rabin from the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing and Hamburg University in Germany, were published today in the journal Science Advances [full text no paywall]. They found that the parchment was processed in an unusual way, using a mixture of salts found in evaporites — the material left from the evaporation of brines — but one that was different from the typical composition found on other parchments…”