New Dead Sea Scrolls Discovered

Archaeologists Excited to Unearth Two New Fragments in the Cave of Skulls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of nearly 1,000 manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Greek, which contain some of the oldest known versions of the Hebrew Bible and are said to be one of the greatest archaeological finds in history. Now, two more pieces of Dead Sea Scrolls and some textile wrapped around a bundle of beads have been found in the Cave of the Skulls in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea.

The scroll fragments have yet to be deciphered because the writing on them is so faint, but it is possible that they will add new, previously unknown information about the life of Jesus. Researchers from Hebrew University and the Israel Antiquities Authority say they still are unsure whether the writing is in Hebrew, Aramaic or a completely different dialect altogether.

The pieces of papyrus are about 2 by 2 cm (0.78 by 0.78 of an inch) and others are fragmentary. Some have writing, some do not have discernible writing, says Haartez in an article about the find.

Archaeologists renewed explorations of the cave in May and June 2016 after Roman and Iron Age documents started being sold on the black market.

“The most important thing that can come out of these fragments is if we can connect them with other documents that were looted from the Judean Desert, and that have no known provenance," Dr. Uri Davidovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Haaretz.



Some of the 870 Dead Sea Scrolls found in past years showed clear writing, but others are more difficult to decipher and are still being analyzed. The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd who tossed a rock into a cave near Qumran and heard a jar cracking, Haaretz says. The shepherd went into the cave and found documents that came to be called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Archaeologist Yohanan Ahranoi discovered the Cave of the Skulls in 1960. It was named for the seven human skulls and other bones in it. It is one of several caves that comprise a large cave complex of natural spaces on a steep cliff alongside the Tze’elim stream in the desert.

Nearby is the Cave of the Arrows where 30-inch arrow shafts plus iron arrowheads about 1,800 years old were located. Extremely dry conditions in the Judean Desert help preserve even organic objects.

Also nearby is the Cave of the Scrolls, where early documents dating to the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt have been unearthed.

People have occupied the caves on and off from prehistoric times until the period when Rome ruled Judea. Many of the finds made during the latest period are fragmentary and may have been from secondary dumps by looters.

Earlier finds in the cave include fragments of textiles, rope, leather items, wooden artifacts and bone tools. Pieces of a wooden lice comb dating to the Bar Kokhba revolt also were found there, Haaretz reports.

Supplementing the organic finds are pottery shards, stone vessels and flint objects. Metal objects included needles and hollow-headed hobnails for use on sandals.

The most recent textile bundle containing beads has not been opened but was x-rayed to ascertain what is inside. This bundle joins two others that Dr. Aharoni found. It is the biggest cache of beads in the Levant from the Chalcolithic period, which predates the Copper Age.



Unfortunately, looters digging in the caves have upset the layers so much it is hard to determine exactly when some artifacts and objects date from.

The findings of remains of thousands of food items, including palm dates, olives, pomegranates and barley and wheat back up professional estimates that the caves’ use by humans dates to the Chalcolithic and by rebelling refugees during the Roman era more than 2,000 years ago.

Uri Davidovich, one of the excavation directors, told Haaretz: “We have all the reasons to believe that there are still scrolls hidden. Several documents from the Roman times and even from the Iron Age have surfaced in recent years in the antiquities market. They must have originated in the Judean Desert caves.”

Source: Mark Miller

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Egypt’s Oldest Papyrus Detail Great Pyramid Construction

The oldest-known of Egyptian writing, which describe the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient hieroglyphics, have been placed on public display at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

In 2013, a joint team of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered a remarkable find in a cave at the ancient Red Sea port of Wadi el-Jarf—hundreds of inscribed papyrus fragments that were the oldest ever unearthed in Egypt. As Egyptologists Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard detailed in a 2014 article in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, the ancient texts they discovered included a logbook from the 27th year of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu that described the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.



The hieroglyphic letters inscribed in the logbook were written more than 4,500 years ago by a middle-ranking inspector named Merer who detailed over the course of several months the construction operations for the Great Pyramid, which was nearing completion, and the work at the limestone quarries at Tura on the opposite bank of the Nile River. Merer’s logbook, written in a two-column daily timetable, reports on the daily lives of the construction workers and notes that the limestone blocks exhumed at Tura, which were used to cover the pyramid’s exterior, were transported by boat along the Nile River and a system of canals to the construction site, a journey that took between two and three days.

The inspector, who led a team of sailors, also noted that the vizier Ankhhaef, Khufu’s half-brother and the “chief for all the works of the king,” was overseeing the enormous construction project. Additional logbooks provide information about other projects undertaken by the same team of sailors in the same year, including the construction of a harbor along the Mediterranean Sea.



After their discovery in the caves of Wadi el-Jarf, which is the most ancient maritime harbor known to date, the archaeologists transferred nearly 800 fragments of varying sizes in 100 glass frames to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. Last Thursday, six of the papyri were placed on public display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as part of a special exhibition.

Among the papyri now open to public view are accounting documents. Very similar to modern-day ledgers, the ancient financial balance sheets record revenues transferred from various Egyptian provinces in red and payments for food and wages in black. “The documents indicate the highly efficient administrative system in Khufu’s reign,” said Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.

According to the Associated Press, ministry official Sabah Abdel-Razek told the Egyptian state-news agency that other papyri describe food distribution to workers, including one in clear hieroglyphics that records the number of sheep imported for the project. Another ministry official, Hussein Abdel-Bassir, told the Associated Press, “These show the administrative power and the central nature of the state at the time of Khufu.”



Completed sometime between 2560 B.C. and 2540 B.C., the Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that is still standing today. The largest of Egyptian pyramids took an estimated 23 years to complete and, at a height of over 450 feet, remained the tallest structure in the world for nearly 4,000 years. The average weight of the 2.3 million blocks required for its construction was seven tons.

In spite of the location of their discovery nearly 150 miles southeast of Giza, the relics do not contain any information about activities related to the pyramid construction at Wadi el-Jarf. “The surprising presence of these documents on the Red Sea site at Wadi el-Jarf is most likely explained by the fact that the same specialized teams that worked on the construction of the royal tomb were also responsible for some operations at this port facility,” Tallet surmised. One possible explanation is that the Red Sea port could have been a distant dependency of the Great Pyramid project in order to obtain the copper needed to fashion the necessary tools for the structure’s construction.



Source: Christopher Klein, History Channel

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Archaeologists Discover Possible “Homo Erectus” Footprints in East Africa

It is an extinct hominid that lived from 1.9 million years to 70,000 years before the present -his extinction is linked to the Toba catastrophe theory - Lower and middle Pleistocene

Nearly 800,000 years ago, one of modern man’s prehistoric ancestors walked along the shore of a large lake in what is now known as Eritrea, in northeastern Africa. This individual’s footprints, preserved in the sandy soil, were eventually buried under thousands of years’ worth of sediment as the lake dried up and the region transformed into arid desert. According to a team of Italian and Eritrean researchers, this is the story behind their recent discovery of what may be the oldest fossilized footprints of Homo erectus ever.

The early hominid species Homo erectus, or “upright man”, is thought to have emerged in eastern Africa around 1.9 million years ago. The Homo erectus had smaller brains and larger teeth than modern humans, walked upright (as the name would suggest), and appeared to have been the first human species to learn how to control fire about 1 million years ago. Fossils of Homo erectus found as far afield in South Africa, Europe, Middle East, China, and Indonesia show that the species ranged over a large portion of the globe before eventually making way for other groups, including modern humans (Homo sapiens) around 200,000 years ago.



Now, a team of researchers has discovered what may be the oldest-ever fossilized Homo erectus footprints in the Danakil Desert located in the northeastern African country of Eritrea. Italian archaeologists joined forces with researchers from the National Museum of Eritrea to uncover a square slab of stone measuring about 26 meters (85 feet) buried in a stretch of desert sand. The slab contained a set of footprints which the researchers believe were left by a Homo erectus individual around 800,000 years ago.

“Fossilized footprints are extremely rare,” Alfredo Coppa, the archaeologist from Rome’s Sapienza University who led the dig, told the Local. In the same area, however, archaeologists have found the fossilized remains of five or six different Homo erectus individuals, and the team plans to carry out more digs nearby.



The researchers believe the region where the footprints were found looked quite different 800,000 years ago. According to their hypothesis, the prints, which are nearly identical to modern human footprints, were left in the sandy sediment along the shore of a large lake. After they filled with water and eventually dried out, the footprints were buried by more and more sand and preserved over many thousands of years. Alongside the prints, which move from north to south, the researchers found the tracks of a gazelle-like animal that the Homo erectus individual may have been stalking.

If confirmed, the discovery of such ancient Homo erectus footprints promises to help scientists understand how the posture and bipedalism of early hominids evolved. As Coppa put it: “Footprints will reveal a lot about the evolution of man, because they provide vital information about our ancestors gait, and locomotion.”



Though the prints found in Eritrea are believed to be the oldest Homo erectus footprints discovered to date, they are far from the oldest hominid prints known to exist. In the late 1970s, a team of archaeologists led by Mary Leakey found a trail of footprints measuring about 27 meters (88 feet) long, preserved in layers of wet volcanic ash in Laetoli, Tanzania. The 70 footprints in the trail were identified as 3.8-million-year-old tracks made by Australopithecus afarensis, the first of man’s ancestors to walk upright. Leakey’s team discovered the so-called “Laetoli Footprints” just a few years after archaeologists stumble on the most famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen, the 3.2-million-year-old female skeleton nicknamed “Lucy,” while fossil-hunting in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle in 1974.

Source: Sarah Pruitt

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