The Scrolls, the Scrolls

Scrolls on the brain, one century to the next

Scrolls from the Wilderness of the Dead Sea by Frank Moore Cross

One of the more optimistic and hopeful developments of the past few years is the scroll prize. If you’ve not heard of the scroll prize, it can be explained quite simply. In a villa in Herculaneum, near Pompeii and destroyed by the same action of Vesuvius, there were many scrolls. Almost two thousand have been claimed found. These were once the library, it seems, of a rich and cultivated family. There are many conjectures about who that family may be. But we do not know.

These are scrolls, but they are not scrolls conventionally understood. Instead, they have been cooked, baked, freeze dried, as some have said. They resemble petrified wood. And in theory, at least, they ought to be readable, if only in part.

Over the centuries, efforts — mostly failed — have been made to read them. The clumsiest and earliest efforts consisted of people attempting to prize them open, to peel the dry, dry material apart. Naturally, this ended badly, with the whole scroll crumbling into dust as did the ill-preserved books of the foolish Eloi did in the film of The Time Machine. Other efforts were a little more inventive. Attempted scroll-studiers of the past attached thin strings to the outer edges of the school, and hung minute weights to the ends of the strings, hoping to bid the scrolls unwrap in this way. What successes there were did not last. The scrolls never yielded up their secrets. Many scrolls were destroyed in these clumsy, years-ago efforts to read them. It seemed a pointless endeavour to try.

Some locals threw the scrolls on the fire, said they were only good as a substitute for the logs they resembled.

But some of the locals, let us call them historically minded, decided not to do away with this taunting, tantalising trove of material. The hope still remained, the remarkable idea that there, if only the scrolls could be unwrapped, could be an entire literature in Latin and in Greek, unread for two thousand years, possibly vanished from all historical record. Such a tiny portion of all classical literature survived the vicious cruelty time offers to all things living or made by man. There must be things there that would change our understanding of Mediterranean civilisation quite remarkably.

Many of the scrolls now rest in museums and classical collections. The villa where the scrolls lay was not fully excavated. There may yet be more of them, buried, so far unexposed to sunlight and to cruel use in attempting to peer into them.

Efforts in the earlier part of this century made some progress with infrared scans. Work was being done, if slowly. The funding was not there. The whole thing was in doubt.

A new project, launched less this decade, bids to use the wisdom of the crowds and computers to solve the mysteries of the scrolls. By CT scanning the items as if they were living tissue, technical skills might be used to segment the whole. Eventually it might be possible to see individual layers of the scroll, and then to make out the differing consistencies of papyrus and ink. It might be done — it has already been done in small numbers — we may begin to read the scrolls.

This book is about another collection of written material which was found and read almost miraculously: the Dead Sea scrolls. To say that this discovery changed archaeology is to understate things. It was an immense find, one which presented to a surprised world documents of great antiquity in a remarkable state of preservation. Cross’s book is almost a catalogue of the exhibit which travelled the world after the scrolls were discovered and they began to be worked upon. It is a catalogue of wonders. It’s possible to forget what a revelation the Dead Sea scrolls were. But it is just attainable we will see another of its sort in our lifetimes.

There is always the hope of reading a little more, of seeing a little further back. It’s human nature. We stare at cave art made by whole peoples who do not, now, have a name. We wish to defy history, to defy time. To prove that the past existed, that it counted just as much as our temporary present. To prove that human life, and human endeavour, matters. We may see another demonstration soon.