The Dead Sea Scrolls, written between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D., were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near Khirbat Qumran in the West Bank, on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea. Most of the scrolls—which comprise the oldest known versions of the books canonized as part of the Hebrew Bible, as well as apocrypha and mystical liturgical texts—were inscribed in Hebrew. A small number were written in Aramaic or Greek. Only a few were found intact. The rest had disintegrated into fragile scraps, around 25,000 in total, according to the paper.
Scientific American
