The Copper Scroll Project by Shelley Neese

Author:Shelley Neese [Neese, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, General, Middle East, Israel & Palestine, Jewish, Religion, Biblical Studies, History & Culture, Antiquities & Archaeology, Biography & Autobiography, Adventurers & Explorers
ISBN: 9781683509165
Google: Dj1lDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2018-07-24T00:43:05+00:00

Gutter

The next morning Jim made sure that the team arrived at the site on time by getting Ken, the retired trucker, to drive. “Archaeologists have the hours of morning talk show hosts,” Casey said, trying to wipe the sleep out of his eyes.

Peleg again beat the team to the site. Standing by the entrance with his same three diggers, Peleg looked anxious to get started. He glanced at Larry and Shawn who were accidentally in matching outfits; only Shawn meant his tan polyester pants and cowboy cut button-down shirt as an ironic hipster statement.

Chris suspected that, after the teaser discovery of the large crystal, Peleg was as intrigued by the gutter as they were. Without knowing exactly where the items were buried, the entire length of the twenty-foot shaft needed to be excavated. Unknown to Peleg, Robo-Cam waited in the trunk on standby.

The drainage channel butted up next to the edge of the complex and then dropped off by a sloping cliff. The team had to straddle the outer wall to create plenty of room for the diggers to get the best angles. From where Jim stood, he could see part of Cave 4. First found by Bedouin in 1952, the man-made cave—which was really two caves—was littered with 15,000 fragments from hundreds of manuscripts. De Vaux and his band of archaeologists never noticed it while they were excavating the ruins, even though the Bedouin were siphoning off its contents in pieces to the highest bidders.

Initially, Peleg instructed the diggers to expose the exterior of the stone pipe, buried under sediment brought in by the desert winds. They then dug trenches two feet deep on the outer sides of the shaft. When the diggers came across a potsherd (piece of ancient pottery) they casually handed it to Peleg. Peleg organized them into two piles: flat or curved.

“Flat potsherds are nothing special. What I mostly care about are the curved ones,” Peleg told me. I tried to coax him out of his shyness with questions. “Curved potsherds give better clues about what they were used for.” Holding up two curved sherds, he went on, “These are both Herodian period. One was part of a bowl; the other was part of a cooking pot.” Archaeologists like Peleg can instinctively recall arcane details about what differentiates one piece of pottery from the next. Finding an inscribed potsherd in the dirt is like spotting a double rainbow in the sky. The only inscribed potsherds at Qumran were found outside a boundary wall in 1996. One of the potsherds preserves eighteen lines from a deed of gift, possibly a witness to an Essene initiate donating his private assets which included his home, a slave, and trees.

Peleg apologized for his English; he was nimbler in Hebrew and Arabic. “I speak to you guys in English, the diggers in Arabic, and the whole time I’m thinking in Hebrew.” He grasped his bald head demonstrating the headache of trilingualism. Working together for seventeen years, Peleg learned Arabic from bantering day in and day out with the same three Bedouin diggers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.