sectarians, wherever they might have lived in Judah and the Judean hills, from where, ... Textual writing was first developed in Mesopotamia (Elam), where cuneiform ... Egyptians also started to write, making use of hieroglyphs and pictograms.
1
INK In the light of the Dead Sea scrolls How did the ancients make their ink and what did they use as pen? Jan Gunneweg Ph.D. Archaeometry-Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem My ink research started 27 years ago in 1985, when Magen Broshi, then the director of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, which presently accommodates the Dead Sea scrolls, showed me a page with PIXE data obtained from the UC-Davis laboratory, USA. He asked me: “Can you make any sense of these data?” The data consisted of PIXE elemental abundances in nanogramme per cm² of ten fragments of Dead Sea scrolls, of which eight fragments were parchment and two were papyrus, all inscribed with ink. It also included an ostracon from Kadesh Barnea, now in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an abecedarian found on an ostracon in Qumran. Ink research at Qumran focuses on the possibility of determining the chemical composition of the ink that was used for writing the Dead Sea scrolls. This is done in the hope that eventually one will be able to distinguish the various scribes who wrote the manuscripts according to the specific way they made their ink, and to detect where the scrolls were written according to the site-specific chemical composition of each ink. Ink fingerprinting can shed light on the dispersion of the sectarians, wherever they might have lived in Judah and the Judean hills, from where, probably, some of the scrolls were brought to Qumran. The first basic question to ask is: what would a Hebrew scribe 2,000 years ago, or indeed today, have needed to write a text, whether holy or laic of nature? The most rudimentary requirement would have been a place to sit down and write, which he could have done in any room or corner as long as there were plenty of light to see the script. Secondly, he needed either a table and a stool or just a plank that he could place on his knees or on the edge of a table, tipped 40 degrees towards the scribe on which he could lay a sheet of parchment, papyrus or paper. The choice would have depended on his traditional background, as is depicted in images of scribes from various periods in Figure 1. Thirdly, the scribe would have needed a ruler to measure the size of the pages as well as the distance between the horizontal lines under which he would have had to write, if he were writing in Hebrew. He also needed a knife or a pair of scissors to cut the sheets to the right size, and a knife to sharpen his pen after the point became blunted. Fourthly, he needed a pen to write with, be it a reed, quill or date palm stalk, or just a wooden or metal stylus. Fifthly, he needed ink that adhered well to the sheet’s surface and would not come off with constant use or at the touch of one’s fingers. Finally, he needed an inkwell of a special shape and
2 size, which would contain the ink and collect excessive ink from his pen, and would also be easy to take with him wherever he went. Before departure, he let the liquid evaporate. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of civilizations have disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving even a letter or a single word of the language they undeniably spoke. Even the comparatively recent and sophisticated Philistines in the 13th century BC did not leave us a single letter, whereas civilizations before them and contemporaneously with them left us tales, legends and commercial contracts, such as the Akad and Anat legends of Ugarit or the Enuma Elish from Sumerian sources. The reason nobody felt the urge to write a single order or an agreement between two individuals in antiquity will probably remain an enigma. The recent invention of the alphabet, as opposed to systems of single signs or depictions, has enabled us not only to understand what the ancients talked about and recorded, but in many cases also to know how their language sounded by carefully comparing it with similar letters and sounds used today. The first writing was invented in Mesopotamia and was an answer to a social and financial need for keeping account of agricultural goods, which had to be recorded for distribution in various directions to livestock farmers. As a result, the majority of these writings are an archive of inventories in the agricultural domain. For a global overview of the birth of writing, I refer to the beautifully illustrated catalogue (Naissance de l’ecriture, 1982) from the 1982 Exhibit in the Grand Palais at Paris, wherein known epigraphists and curators wrote the accompanying texts. Writing became customary for recording contracts of various kinds, but it took quite some time before it was used for conserving an oral tradition, telling a story or expressing private human feelings in script. Textual writing was first developed in Mesopotamia (Elam), where cuneiform (literally “nailscript”) signs were used to compose words in written form. Earlier script did not represent a text but a conglomeration of signs in clay or wood, used to express a message without necessarily reflecting the way people were actually talking to one another. Not long afterwards, the ancient Egyptians also started to write, making use of hieroglyphs and pictograms. The question of who was the first to write, I leave to the scholars of Mesopotamian or Egyptian scribal evidence. Hebrew script, based on 22 letters, is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, whose inventor is unknown. Lately, some trace the beginning of the alphabet based on drawings in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Paleo-Hebrew, its earliest form, was used on ostraca, seals, bullae and a few textual remains such as the priestly benediction inscribed on a silver amulet of the 7th c. BC that was found in Ketef Ben Gehinnom in Jerusalem. The later “square Hebrew script” (German Quadrat Schrift), so called because each letter is made within a square, is based on Aramaic of the 3rd c. BC.
3 Whenever one reads a paper on the scribal practices at Qumran, one comes across terms like scrolls, papyrus, ostraca, parchment, carbon-, soot- or lampblack ink, fluids, binders and pens. The latest news comes from a paper that mentions ink made of vine soot, but perhaps overlooks the fact that this was customary in the 1600s but unknown in Qumran (Rasmussen et al. 2012, p. 2967). I feel it my duty to record some comments that came up after this paper was published in JAOS 2012. The paper describes ink remains that I obtained from the Martin Schøyen inkwell. It all started with an invitation by Martin Schøyen in September 2009 to his home at Spikkestad, Norway. There he allowed me not only to take a sample of the intact scroll jar he possesses – the reason I was invited – but also, among others, to sample the ink from a bronze inkwell that was sold to him as having been found at Qumran. Scrapings with a scalpel delivered about 1 gram of ink, which was mixed with green copper scrapings from the inside of the bronze well. My objective was to establish the chemical composition of this ink and specifically its date, corroborating or refuting ink data we already had from the ESRF synchrotron in Grenoble. Since I have had fruitful collaboration with J. v. d. Plicht and K. Rasmussen, it was decided that they would perform the dating at the AMS-C14 dating facilities in Groningen, Netherlands. At the very start of the Schøyen ink project, I met Rasmussen at the IMEC 2010 congress at Tel Aviv University, where he asked me for a sample of the Schøyen ink to be analyzed for radiocarbon. This would provide a date for the ink as well as the inkwell. I reckoned that a date for the Schøyen ink would certainly point to a specific period that would corroborate or refute the Qumran connection, time wise. It was highly necessary to establish a date, because otherwise we only had the word of the son of the original antiquarian, who told Schøyen under oath that the bronze inkwell containing the ink had come from Qumran in the 1950s. For one reason or another, the sample was insufficient to provide a reliable date, although in 2012 some data were reported (Rasmussen et al. 2012), which I will quote later. Rasmussen asked for an additional sample and I suggested using all of it to obtain a justified date for the ink. In the same year, Rasmussen took a half-year sabbatical in Italy and invited Italian scholars to establish the chemical composition of the ink by applying very different cutting-edge analytical techniques to the remains of the sample I had sent him previously. In 2012, the joint Rasmussen collaboration paper came out, primarily dealing with the chemical composition of the ink, which was to be used as a fingerprint to trace the provenance of Dead Sea scroll ink. Although a series of highly interesting observations were revealed, I feel it my duty to air some of my comments concerning that paper. Let us start with the conclusion of Rasmussen’s paper (Rasmussen et al. 2012) on ink found in the inkwell of the Schøyen Collection, in order to later compare these results with those obtained in a
4 study applying INAA, as we have analyzed the same ink at the nuclear reactor in Budapest. The first quote is taken from the conclusion of the Rasmussen paper: “An entirely new insight has been provided into the composition of the ink used in the Schøyen inkwell, which likely was used in the scriptorium at Qumran.” This sentence covers the title of the Rasmussen paper that stated: “The constituents of a sample of ink from an inkwell allegedly found at Qumran: New prospects for provenancing [sourcing] the ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Well, a title may contain an allusion to Qumran, whereas the remaining quote: “New prospects for provenancing … etc.” is a little inaccurate because sourcing the ink to that which was used to write the Dead Sea scrolls is exactly what has to be proven and what in fact was not analyzed. What in the title was a hypothetical statement (“allegedly found at Qumran”) became in the conclusion an affirmative declaration that this ink from the Schøyen inkwell “likely was used in the scriptorium at Qumran.” In the light of the provided data, however, we cannot reach this conclusion. The mentioned analytical techniques that were performed in the Rasmussen ink study, i.e. GCMS, Raman, FT-IR, PXRD, LIBS, ICP-MS, protein analysis, all had to do with the composition of the ink and did not gather any information on the origin/provenience of where the ink was made or used for writing. Identifying the provenience would not have been impossible because nothing else was analyzed to compare it with. Once one assumes that Qumran was really the site where the ink came from, one starts to look for archaeological finds from the Qumran excavations, for example the presence of the chickens that would be needed for the Gallus gallus albumen found in the ink. The association could be right but is insufficient to prove that the ink came from Qumran. I have a term for this: circular reasoning. Thus, the finds of nine items, consisting of different grain types, the rare mineral monohydrocalcite, the albumen of Gallus gallus, polysaccharides as well as Gum Arabica, fatty acids from lipids, and a probable vine black for the pigment of the ink, plus grains containing Fe, Cu and Al, are all interesting compositional elements in the Schøyen ink, but the key to the provenance of this ink and the comparison with that used for writing the Dead Sea scrolls is still open for a deeper study than the following conclusion suggests. It says, and I quote: “therefore opens up, for the first time, for an opportunity to provenance ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other manuscripts from Israel and the Levant at the time of the main habitation in Qumran.” To convert this quote into reality, we first need a date for this particular ink. The published report mentions some ingredients of the chemical composition of the Schøyen ink, but these are insufficient for provenience work. It will be shown at a later stage in this chapter how by applying INAA to the same ink we found that, for example, the ink had never been in the Dead Sea area. This finding is based on the lack of any Br and low level Cl, which we had found in all the other ink, parchment, textile, cistern clay deposits and ceramics that we analyzed. With this, we thus exclude any connection of the
5 Schøyen inkwell with Qumran, and consequently with the scriptorium that was mentioned in the paper’s final conclusion. The second quote refers to the use of vine black in the Schøyen ink. It stated: “…the sample consists of a lamp black or vine black, as both black pigments are devoid of calcium phosphate.” Moreover, “the spectra obtained with the diode laser, [reveal] that the brown/black grains contain iron-based compounds, which is also substantiated by the LIBS spectrum showing a complex mixture of elements: among others Fe, Si, Mg, and Cu” (both quotes from page …). Once again, my answer to this is that the inkwell with its ink is not from the Qumran district. So we do not have to search for reasons to keep chickens at Qumran, or for a vineyard growing vine branches for making vine black. Rasmussen continued in the discussion that “Elgvin and Pfann tentatively concluded that the Schøyen inkwell should be attributed to the Qumran Period III, although they said Period II was also possible.” In this quote, we switch again from the analytical data back to archaeology as if the link with Qumran had been proven. The link is assumed, irrespective of whether one follows de Vaux’s hypothesis where Period III refers to Roman soldiers after the sectarian occupation of 68 AD, or that of Elgvin and Pfann that “that there is no scroll activity in Period III” and “Period III was a Jewish habitation, although also unconnected to the scrolls.” The circular reasoning is obvious here, because these scholars are trying to find a reason for linking the Schøyen and Dead Sea scroll ink, although the link itself is exactly what we have to prove first by analyzing both sets of writings. The sentence: “One of the three inkwells found by de Vaux also had a Period III context (locus 31)” is not of any help either because the L. 31 inkwell was not analyzed. Moreover, who can prove that the content of locus 31 was certainly Period II or III? An interim answer would be: Schøyen’s inkwell does not belong to the Qumran area; not even to the general Dead Sea area. It came from a district that has nothing in common with the Dead Sea area. Regarding the date of this ink, the paper stated, and I quote: “Dating problems in Qumran. However, this goal was not achieved in the present investigation. We suspect that in both dating attempts there remained some contamination in the samples. The δ13C of sample GrA-49448 was 19.97 ‰ VPDB, which is far from the expected value.” If the inkwell WAS imported or brought to Qumran, we should have to analyze many fragments of ink-bearing Dead Sea scrolls in order to find a match with the ink from the Schøyen inkwell. I don’t have to tell the reader that this is at present almost impossible to establish because of the IAA’s sheer refusal to provide more Dead Sea scroll fragments for analyses in the future. In the light of the above paragraphs, I must stress once again that scientists have an obligation to provide the best analytical results performed on archaeological samples, while the archaeologist has to ask the right questions before any scientific work starts. Furthermore, once the results are in there must be a strict collaboration between the archaeologist and the scientist, which is based
6 first and always on common sense and the probability that the data provides an answer to the archaeological problem. In the context of what scholars have written so far, I will give another example of how analytical data and archaeological facts are being linked in the case of the jar, originally dubbed Jar-35, found on the Qumran plateau, which lies south and outside of the welldescribed borders of the Qumran settlement. In Bio-and Material Cultures, a combined group of scientists from Barcelona University and Technical Institute established that Jar-35 was indeed used for keeping wine, based on the analyses of the jar’s deposit samples that I provided them. The archaeological situation of the jar being found among the cooking facilities and buried heaps of animal bones on the Qumran plateau made sense, since food was consumed and wine was probably drunk during these meals on the plateau. We could not say more than that, otherwise we too would fall into the trap of wishful thinking instead of showing the facts. Well, INAA traced Jar-35 itself to Jerusalem, which was interesting since it was the only item that matched the Motsa Clay formation in the locality of Jerusalem. However, what was missing was a precise date for the jar, which would corroborate or refute the simultaneous use of the Qumran settlement and its southern plateau. With the sample of the wine-jar deposit, a few 3-4 mm diameter grains of carbon found amidst that deposit were also sent to the AMS C14 lab in Groningen for radiocarbon dating in order to provide a date for the jar. At a later stage, Rasmussen et al. established that wine was not present, but gypsum instead. Now that may be true based on the many analyses that were performed, but archaeologically there is nobody who can explain this. As a result, the question of whether the deposit contains wine or is only gypsum remains wide open. The paper on where the gypsum could have been taken from is good for the geology of the site, but does not provide a definitive answer to the composition of the content of Jar-35, as I see it. The general conclusion that can be drawn from the two above-mentioned examples of applying science to archaeological artifacts is that handling micro-size samples is not always sufficient to obtain a general picture of how an artifact was made, what exactly it was made of and where it was made. In many instances, bulk samples of a few milligrams are certainly providing a wider range of parameters, such as a quantitative amount of major, minor and trace elements, which are likely to give answers that are more definitive. Because of the quantitative analyses, these results can also be used for statistical matching with data from other similar artifacts. Having said this, I return to the probable way of making ink 2,000 years ago. The procedure has been described several times and the full reports can be found in books (e.g. see Reed 1957 et al.). So, why do I write yet another chapter on the making of ink? Well, the reason is that I do not believe parts of what has been recorded, especially not those concerning Qumran.
7
Egyptian scribes
Gregory & 3 scribes
Nubian scribe
A Yemenite scribe
Greek Douris man scribe
JG scribe
Rabbi Moshe Zarum scribe
8 Figure 1. Various positions of scribes, ancient as well as modern, while writing a manuscript or using a stylus on a wax table as is shown on the decorated pot with the Douris scribe. Gregory ivory relief in Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum, Kunstkammer Inv. Nr. 8399. Since Broshi and El-Nir’s 1996 paper, we have known that the ink the ancients used to write the Judean Desert manuscripts was based primarily on carbon. Nevertheless, Krusko in UC Davis had already mentioned in 1985 that the main constituent of the Qumran ink was lampblack. This ink, however, cannot be made by just grinding carbonised wood; one needs almost nano-particle-size soot to get a clean script. The following section is of specific interest because of three questions: 1. How did a Late Second Temple Period Jew make ink for writing manuscripts, including the Judean Desert scrolls? An anwer to this question will appear in Chapter 12 of this book “I am in Trans”. 2. How far does the modern way of making ink in orthodox Jewish circles of scribes in Me’ah Shearim, and of course elsewhere, differ from the way it was made for writing on parchment? Does a modern scribe writing the Torah do it differently from those who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls 2,000 years ago? 3. Can we trace the ink back to a specific scribe or to the site where he was located? When I started to look into current writing practices, I soon found out that three comments or caveats apply: 1. Even in present orthodox circles in Jerusalem, there are different recipes according to the origin of the scribe, for example a Yemenite versus a Moroccan or an Ashkenazi Jew, and this could also have been the case in ancient times. 2. When we compare present with ancient ink recipes we should bear in mind that the Dead Sea scrolls might represent only the sectarian way of preparing parchment and ink, since that sect’s lifestyle and texts are revolutionarily different from those we know about from other written sources, for example the practices that followed the constitutional set-up of Jewish Jerusalem with its priests and its Temple tradition. At present, we simply do not know what the difference was. 3. Finally, there are many recipes for making ink and parchment that are mentioned in the Mishna and the Talmud and by Jewish writers during the Middle Ages. These will not be studied here, first because they do not bear any significance for Qumran; and secondly, because we would also need scholars who could help with the exegesis of all these texts, which is not within the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, there is a genuine trend towards returning to the source among present-day orthodox Jews, who want to know if their tradition of making ink as well as parchment dates back two millennia. The tradition alone, whether in written or oral form, cannot give the right answer because there exist several inconsistent recipes. So science has been called in to help. From the studies on ink already performed, we know that the basic ingredient of ink in the Late Second Temple era was organic in character and, specifically, lampblack, and this is what we shall focus on in this chapter.
9
Ingredients The traditional preparation of good Ink in ancient times is a threefold process. The basic ingredients for making ink are lampblack (soot, carbon), water, and a binder that first of all keeps the carbon together and also makes it adhere permanently to a sheet of parchment or papyrus with the aid of inherent mordants and adhesives. 1. Lampblack Lampblack is basically carbon. When you need carbon for making ink, you cannot just take a piece of carbonised wood or any other burnt organic material and grind it to a small-size powder. Most carbon obtained in this way would be too coarse to produce a neat script. Instead, you need micron- or almost nano-size particles, which cannot be obtained merely by grinding. Thus I set out to reproduce at home the ink-making process as I had seen and recorded in Me’ah Shearim in Jerusalem in September 2008. For making this type of ink, you need an oil lamp with a wick and olive oil, and a sheet of glass or copper or both; as simple as that. You first light the wick of an oil lamp, items that were also accessible 2,000 years ago, and hold the flame just beneath a glass plate. When I used linen for the wick, the flame was soon extinct. Cotton, instead, did a wonderful job in that the flame burned evenly and continuously. I soon found that the glass I was using became extremely hot and it did eventually burst, as shown in Figure 2 a & b where the 6 mm-thick glass plate broke into three parts.
10
Figure 2. At left, soot beneath a glass plate. On the right, the broken glass plate and copper/bronze sheet. Below, scraped-off soot collected on paper using a thin reed from one time used carbon smoke. So, the second way to assemble enough lampblack would have been to hold a metal sheet just above the flame. I took a thin bronze sheet, and Figure 2 shows that soot was deposited underneath. When all was black, the soot was collected onto paper with the aid of a thin reed (see Figure 2, right). This was put into a small pot with a diameter of 3 cm and a height of 5 cm, and it filled one third of the pot. Making soot in this way took me two hours, after which there was enough lampblack to make ink. Showing some ingenuity; at Meah Shearim there is a rabbi scribe who obtains his ink by burning rubber car tires in the Jerusalem Forest, West of the city. 2. Arabic gum as a binder The second step consists of dissolving pieces of resin of the acacia tree (Acacia Senegal and Acacia seyal), the so-called Arabic gum (sam’a in Arabic, Hebrew samech-mem-‘ain), in a very small quantity of water. Water does not dissolve Arabic gum, so this must first be ground in a mortar with the aid of a pestle. When the gum has become a pulp it remains flexible due to its fine particle size and the water it was dissolved in. Then, you add lampblack and mix the gum and soot in the water solution into a paste.
Figure 3. Drops of Arabic gum (left) and Ketira flakes (right).
11
At present, there are many types of gum that can serve the ink maker. Recently, Ketira gum (Gond Katira), a shrub of the Tragacanth family, also called "goat's thorn,” has started to be used. Found in Iran and in the area of Central and Southern India, the plant extends to Malaysia. It serves as a substitute for Arabic gum. It is, however, highly unlikely that this was used 2,000 years ago at Qumran. If the scribe were to add more water to the paste, he would certainly be able to write a text on parchment. But, when this type of ink dried, it would easily flake, break and separate from the parchment sheet, particularly when various sheets were rolled into a scroll. Further moving the parchment about would make the text illegible, since parts of letters would soon be missing. The latter observation indicates that something has to be added to the ink-pulp to make it adhere to parchment or papyrus. 3. An additional binder or mordant. The ink process involves a third ingredient, consisting of yet another type of binder, which in our case is the addition of ground oak galls or sap from Rhus leaves (Hebrew Afits). These are the very same materials that are also used in tanning parchment, as we have seen in chapter 10. Any single one of these tanning agents must be boiled in a small quantity of water. In our case, we used a cooking pressure pan for ten minutes. After that, the condensed tanning binder fluid is filtered, added to the mixture of soot and Arabic gum and mixed well. This mordant water content can make the ink fluid enough for writing. In case it is not, a little more water can be added without affecting the strength of the ink. The addition of this type of tanning binder is characteristic in good-quality ink as it makes the ink adhere to the surface of a sheet of parchment and even to dissipate through the various strata and along collagen strings, as synchrotron-based micro-XRF showed in our research at the ESRF (Mueller et al.). As a result, such ink is difficult to remove and is permanent. In Chapter 12, I will show an example in which the ink has separated from the parchment surface; we only saw this by using the synchrotron, because when viewed with the naked eye or by means of a microscope the void beneath the ink remained invisible. It is thus obvious that water is used twice in the ink-making process. This, however, does not mean that the same water is used twice. Nevertheless, already in the 1950s the British and Manchester fieldwork teams established that Dead Sea water was definitely not used in either of the two water addition processes. (From the Allegro correspondence collection to be studied in Chapter 12 of “I am in Trans”.) In the cases described above, it is quite unlikely that the same water source was used twice. It is actually more reasonable that a quantity of lampblack and gum and water was produced in site A, after which it was shipped to site B in pulp, powder or dried cake form, where it was made fluid again with the addition of the second mordant binder matter dissolved in locally available water just before the ink was needed for writing. However, water sources near A and B, when analysed, do not per se have the same chemical composition. This difference shows up in the chemical fingerprint of the ink, making it impossible
12 to trace where the scribe first made his ink and where he finally mixed it ready for use and wrote his scroll. The last sentence is the key to a discussion on the Dead Sea scroll scribes, because if we take the ratio of the elements Cl/Br that Hahn et al. deemed to be constant in sweet-water wells of the Dead Sea area, then the presence of these elements could refer either to the accumulated Dead Sea dust on the written surface of a parchment sheet, which dissipated deeper into its strata, or in the parchment preparation, or in either one of the two water processes to make ink ready for writing. Identifying the Cl/Br ratio would tell us where the scribe wrote the scroll, it was stated (Hahn et al.). If the ratio of the amounts of Br and Cl in the ink and parchment sheets were similar, then the scribe would indeed have been in the Dead Sea area, perhaps even at Qumran. If the Cl/Br ratio were different, the scribe would have written his manuscript elsewhere. We shall return to all this in Chapter 12, where we look at an environmental study of the Dead Sea. Furthermore, it will be very difficult to establish whether Cl and Br came in with the spreading of local dust or the haze hanging over the Dead Sea or with the sweet well-water source near the Dead Sea that was used. Dead Sea water itself was certainly not used for ink preparation; a sweetwater source was used instead, as INAA has shown, since the expected quantities of salts were minimal if the water had been taken from the Dead Sea area. One of the Berlin team interviewed for the 2010 National Geographic documentary on “Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls” asserted that Dead Sea water was used. I categorically reject this, because we can prove that no Dead Sea water was involved. If we look at the chemical composition of ‘Ain Feshkha source water, we learn that it contains 520 mg/liter Na, and 58 mg/liter Br. Just for comparison, the same two elements in the Tiberias Hot Springs are 6900 and 240 mg/liter (Ami Nishrin, 4 March 1976 at the Lake of Kinneret laboratory, in unpublished data in Perlman’s papers now in my possession), ten and five times respectively higher than at ‘Ain Feshkha, so that high Cl and Br are not exceptional and do not only occur in the Dead Sea area. And not only that: the Br at the Dead Sea region is not a constant, neither in the water nor in the haze hanging above the Dead Sea. Sweet water Once we agree that the ancient ink maker used sweet water, we get some options for further discussion. On the one hand, sweet water is found at the 'Ain Feshkha farm site 3 km to the south of Qumran, where a series of sweet water wells are located. If we look at the connections between Qumran and ‘Ain Feshkha, we could easily prove there was such a link, because an inkwell found at 'Ain Feshkha had been locally fired in the Qumran kiln, as INAA has shown (Gunneweg and Balla, 2003, p. 11). Furthermore, ‘Ain Feshkha provided also small clay balls just like the ones found at Qumran. This feature does not occur elsewhere and thus points to the same sort of inhabitants. In short, these sites were interconnected, socially and timewise. But more importantly, sweet water is present at the Qumran building complex derived from rain floodwater that was accumulated in the 16 water cisterns in situ at Qumran. So, why would the
13 ancient hypothetical Qumran scribe have to travel--to and from ‘Ain Feshkha when he had plenty of water at home in Qumran? The Schøyen Collection ink The Schøyen Collection inkwell is a good example of how one can distinguish between genuine and false spot declarations that depend on the word of Bedouin and antiquity dealers. The Schøyen inkwell, MS 1655/2, depicted in Figure 4, of a magnificent make, is made of bronze and decorated. The text of the Schøyen website states: “…. found in 1950, prior to excavations together with a bronze miniature altar…”. Martin Schøyen bought it on the understanding that it came from Qumran. William Kando--under oath--declared that the inkwell was found in Qumran as he, under oath, also stated: “We can also confirm that the fragments from the Temple Scroll with its linen wrapper and a date palm leaf pen you acquired, actually were found together with the Temple Scroll itself in 1956, in the jar with a lid we still have in our shop, in the cave now known as Cave 11. In 1961 we presented the fragments, wrapper and pen as a gift to our customer in Zürich.“ This statement is puzzling, to say the least. If the Temple Scroll were found “in the jar with a lid we still have in our shop,” then one may ask: If the inkwell and altar are pre1950 how come they were given to Kando? De Vaux certainly did not give or sell all these items.
Figure 4. Bronze inkwell from the Schøyen Collection MS 1655/4, measuring 8x8 cm, was found in the 1950s by Bedouin, whereas the accompanying text states that it was found before the excavations started. The ink was identified by INAA. INKWELLS One of the items that would point to writing taking place at Qumran is the finding of inkwells. De Vaux found at Qumran two inkwells in the rubble of Room 30 and a third in Room 31, which lies parallel in N-S direction to Room 30. Two of these inkwells are ceramic whereas the third was made of bronze. The form of these inkwells is not unique. They are Roman, as can be shown from
14 frescoes at Pompeii, destroyed in 79 by ashes from Mount Vesuvius near Naples in Italy (de Vaux 1956: 1979, 29). The Pompeian inkwells, timewise, coincide with those of Qumran. Their specific form has to do with the size, the ease of handling and a narrow opening at the top that prevents the ink from evaporating too fast. The inkwell's opening has an edge allowing the scribe to regulate the ink supply to his pen by just touching the inward-sloping mouth. Spilt ink is able to flow back into the inkwell, in the same way as a Roman oil lamp has a concave ceiling that collects spilt oil and lets it drip back into the lamp through a hole. Most of the excavated inkwells at Qumran are of a shape that corresponds to that shown infra. Figure 5. Some wells are with a handle, others are without.
Figure 5. Image of an inkwell found at Qumran, redrawn from the original photograph (see http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/scrolls/late.html#obj73 ). Such an inkwell was best handled when half-filled, because if it turned over it would retain much of its content, as shown by the illustration in figure 6.
15
Figure 6. Inkwell, half-filled so that it retains most of the ink when turned over. When a scribe had to travel, he could take a half-full inkwell without spilling the liquid as long as he used a small stopper or just let it evaporate to form a cake of ink. The design of the well made this possible. When the water evaporated and the scribe had to write again, he just added some fresh water to the cookie of fatty soot at the bottom. After stirring well, the ink was again ready for use. More on inkwells Stephen Goranson published de Vaux’s inkwells exhaustively (Michmanim 1991, 110-111). None of these have been analyzed by INAA because they are precious and spend almost the entire year somewhere abroad in the travelling Qumran exhibit. One of them has been in the Hecht Museum in Haifa, and is presently at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. When collecting additional ceramic samples to be submitted to INAA, I came across a fourth inkwell (QUM 193) that de Vaux had excavated at ‘Ain Feshkha. He did not recognize it and, since then, it had been overlooked by subsequent archaeologists. The ‘Ain Feshkha inkwell is an important piece of evidence because it proves that Qumran and ‘Ain Feshkha were connected by having scribes who possessed their own locally made inkwell. The importance is that the ‘Ain Feshkha inkwell was actually fired in the Qumran kiln (Gunneweg and Balla 2003, p. 11, QUM 193). In 2000, when sifting once more through ceramics to be analyzed, I found an unmistakable fragment of a fifth inkwell among the Qumran materials, which INAA analysis also proved to belong to local Qumran pottery. This means that at least two of the Qumran inkwells so far were made at the Qumran site. Without keeping to chronological order, Steckoll had previously found what I shall call a sixth inkwell (Steckoll 1969, 2). This contained dried ink. To the best of my knowledge, INAA did not analyze the ink for its elemental composition, nor its container for provenience. In the 1994-2004 digging period east of the Qumran settlement, Magen/Peleg found a seventh inkwell in the dump near the potter’s workshop L. 64. We analyzed it by INAA in 2007 and showed the chemical fingerprint of locally made ceramics at Qumran, becoming the third proven Qumranmade ceramic inkwell. So far, we have three inkwells that were fired in the local Qumran kiln. I personally sampled the ink of the eighth bronze inkwell (MS 1655/2) at Spikkestad in Norway, where a large part of the Martin Schøyen Qumran collection is stored. Mr. Schøyen permitted me also to sample his scroll jar, and moreover ink, dust from inside the jar, and Temple scroll parchment, for which I am very grateful. The ink had come from a bronze inkwell that Kando recorded as coming from room 30. This inkwell should have been number eight. INAA has analyzed the ink as well as the dust of the jar from the Schøyen Collection, we are now able to ascertain that the dust inside the Schøyen scroll jar is Dead Sea area dust, and could be from
16 Qumran, or at least from the Dead Sea area. However, we know from one of the two chemical fingerprints we have on our database that the Schøyen scroll jar was not made at Qumran. As for the ink from the bronze inkwell, it has nothing that resembles anything from the Dead Sea area and had, therefore never been in Qumran but came from elsewhere. Had it been buried in soil or on the floor of a cave, it would have adsorbed bromine as all the remaining items we have analyzed. This analysis contradicts William Kando’s statement mentioned earlier. In 1987, Steven Fine published the (ninth) inkwell that is now located in the University of Southern California. To the best of my knowledge, this inkwell has so far remained without a provenience analysis. The last inkwell, number ten, is also allegedly from Qumran, and is in the Jordanian Museum of Antiquities in Amman (Khairy 1980, fig. 5a and plate 25D). Perhaps this one too can be analyzed now the SESAME connected Cultural Heritage research started in May 2017. The find of inkwells in all other sites in Israel is limited to the one discovered by Eric Meyers in a Meron-based grave (Meyers et al. 1981, p. 109, 118-119). An inkwell shaped similarly to that in Qumran was found in the Burnt House at Jerusalem, now in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem (Avigad 1984, p. 127). INAA did not analyze anyone of these inkwells for provenience. The reason small inkwells have not been analyzed by INAA is because sampling these artifacts is destructive, since INAA needs powder scraped or drilled from the ceramic material of the inkwell. To accentuate the peculiarity of Qumran concerning inkwells, not a single inkwell, quill or reed pen has appeared at Tsippori (Greek Sepphoris), where according to tradition Jewish scribes compiled and signed their oral traditions into a manuscript collection known as the Mishnah. Qumran, therefore, is unique in its inkwell assemblage and therewith a place where writing took place on a large scale, as compared to other sites in Israel and Jordan. There is, therefore, no place in ancient Israel that has provided so many inkwells within an area measuring a mere 60x80 meters. It is thus obvious that the occupation of writing was an important aspect of Qumranite life at the site, whatever other opinions may be held about it. N. Golb, for example, would have a hard task to explain ten inkwells in his Qumran garrison. So would Itziq Magen in his Qumran-as-pottery production site. Therefore, I could go on with all of the purported theories except for one: that the site was indeed a center where manuscripts were archived, studied and in some cases copied, although others came in from elsewhere. Conclusions regarding archaeologically “allegedly found” inkwells at Qumran We shall start with the presentation of real facts on Qumran inkwells. The first inkwell found at Qumran and analyzed by INAA came from the northern Negev. The second was found at ’Ain Feshkha and INAA proved that this one was locally made in the Qumran kiln. This might indicate that Qumran made the inkwell for a scribe who worked in ’Ain Feshkha or that the scribe lived previously in Qumran and took the inkwell with him to ‘Ain Feshkha.
17 All the other inkwells are allegedly from Qumran, based on the word of Bedouin who took the inkwells and sold them to Kando or another antiquity dealer, who might have had an interest in establishing that they were found at Qumran. In the case of the Jordanian inkwell, it is stated that this inkwell was found at Qumran as a surface find “before” the official excavations started in the 1950s. In addition, the unique Schøyen inkwell has a similar historically doubtful background. However, from the past narratives it is obvious that one did not take the numerous inkwells found at Qumran into consideration when one originally discussed the character of Qumran that provided 13 different hypotheses.
On fingers, sticks, quills, reed pens and date palm stalks Scribe utensils A writer needs ink, as we have seen so far. But a scribe also needs an instrument to write with. There are at present many tools that may serve a scribe, but in antiquity, there were not that many sorts of pen to choose from. There were in practice two types of pen: a quill and a reed pen. Both must undergo more or less similar preparations before one can use them to write. You have to find or harvest; sharpen, clean, cut and pare them; and finally split its tip, that, in turn, received a cut perpendicular to the shaft. As to whether you can write with a date palm stalk, I shall later add some interesting information. Writing with your finger or with a wooden or metal stylus Several tools can be used to write with. You can write with your fingers in the sand, which is still done in Africa to date. The handwriting remains in the sand as a means of communication with tribesmen who happen to pass by (Zali & Berthier 1997, 106 ff). A message was written between two to four parallel lines drawn in the soil. You can use a metal tool to inscribe a word or a sentence, a curse or the name of your beloved on a wall, into plaster or ceramic. Egyptians wrote on ceramic figurines their so-called execration texts, ancient Egyptian hieratic texts that describe Pharaoh’s enemies on a personal or foreign national level; in short listing entire nations, they deemed to be enemies. However, when it comes to writing on parchment or papyrus in ancient times, there are in theory only four possible writing tools: wooden sticks, quills, reed pens and date palm stalks. Wooden sticks Every time someone publishes a paper or book on scribal activities at Qumran, they show pieces of wood that have black tips. Usually, the comment is that this tip bears the remnants of ink and the wooden part is a deteriorated pen used for writing manuscripts (Puech). Well, I dare to doubt very much that the sectarians, wherever they wrote, had nothing better than a crumbling stick to write holy or sectarian texts. Perhaps novices received sticks to practice the
18 art of writing on ceramic before touching a real pen. Pens, however, existed during the Roman period and scribes certainly used them.
Figure 7. Wooden stick with black residue at tip, often interpreted as the remains of ink Besides that, a small stick can write with ink on an ostracon i.e. writing on a potshard. Furthermore, a wooden stick or a metal stylus could certainly have served a scribe who wrote a message into wax. Beeswax would have been poured into a hollowed-out pair of small wooden boards, written on, and then fastened by means of thin ropes and a seal. In Qumran, however, we have found no remains that correspond to the above description, so all we may conclude is that the excavators did not find any such remains. Therefore, we will not speculate on the use of wooden sticks for writing the Dead Sea scrolls. That is all there is to say on the use of sticks.
Figure 8. Wax tablet with (my) inscribed words “ouchi Peloponnesos” (I am not a Peloponnesian) [Tablet handmade by Dr. E. Pantos] Quill In the case of a quill, the pen-maker would have chosen a long wing feather from a goose (or swan or turkey) and removed the superfluous stalks, called barbs, near the base. The latter
19 contains matter similar to tiny flakes of dry skin. The stem must be 4-6 mm in diameter at the base and would later contain ink, which would flow to the tip by capillary action. The quill tip was cut diagonally so that the hollow inner side became visible. The procedure for making a good-quality quill involves hardening its tip, while conserving its elasticity. To do so, the scribe takes a fresh bird feather and sticks the tip, which used to be in the skin of the bird and soft, for a minute or so into sand that has been heated by a bonfire. This stiffens the end of the feather. Inside the feather shaft is a bundle of soft tissue that has to be removed, so that only the thin shaft of the quill remains. Next, the scribe cuts the end of the feather with a knife at 35 degrees so that only half the inner hollow becomes visible. Then the remaining half of the quill is pared into a point. This will be the point that is dipped into the ink. However, before anyone can write with the quill, two more procedures have to be carried out. Firstly, the flow of ink has to be facilitated. To do that, the scribe makes a slit of 1 cm length into the pointed end. By pushing down on parchment or papyrus, he would gently apply the flow of ink to the surface of the sheet through the split extreme. Secondly, the tip is placed on a flat stone, pebble or metal surface and the point is cut off with a knife to suit the way the scribe holds the quill in his hand. The tip measures 2-3 mm in width. It is then divided by a perpendicular cut so that the tip has two halves, each 1 mm wide.
Figure 9. A goose feather (left) and the tip pared, split and cut to become a scribe’s quill (right).
Reed pen Reed grows in ponds to great height, but some types of reed have stems that are not strong enough to take the pressure needed for writing. When such a reed dries, it loses a layer of skin at every stage, just as an onion does. The type of reed that is needed must be solid and smooth, like a thinner version of bamboo. In our case, this type of reed (bamboo) also grows near the Dead Sea. This does not mean the reed fails to grow elsewhere in Israel; of course it does.
20
Figure 10. Pond reed in the Botanical Garden (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and bamboo-like reed growing around Kalia beach at the Dead Sea. The reed pen is made in a similar fashion to the quill. The scribe takes a growing reed with a stem/shaft of 1 cm in diameter, and cuts off a piece 20 cm in length. Such a fragment has several knots at certain intervals. At one end, he cuts off the knot so that a hollow pipe becomes visible. In theory, you could write with a pointed piece of bamboo, but usually to get a better grip on the pen you split the reed along its full length, so that only a quarter of the original circumference remains. After this, a tip is made by shaving away the sides of the upper end of the stem/shaft at one of the extremities. This triangular tip is about 1 cm high and has a base of 1 cm. The tip is then cut off perpendicularly to the shaft of the reed pen and in such a way that a straight cut serves a scribe who writes vertically, whereas a slightly upward cut from bottom left to top right in either direction would serve the scribe who holds his pen at 45 degrees to the writing surface. Finally the new tip is split in half to ease the ink flow when pressed on the parchment, papyrus or paper. Some reed pens have a shaft that is intact, i.e. round. Others have been cut vertically, measuring a third or a quarter of the entire shaft’s circumference.
21
Figure 11. Close-up of a reed-pen stylus with a split tip and cut-off tip for a right handed scribe. The stylus is a quarter of the original bamboo shaft. In Hebrew script, each letter is composed of broad and thin strokes. It requires a pen tip that has a broad surface, like a chisel. An example of Hebrew script is shown in figure 12. On the left is the entire letter “T” (tav) as it appears written on parchment. On the right is the sequence that is followed by a scribe to make this letter with its broad (1, 4 and 5) and thin (2 and 3) pen strokes. There is a peculiarity to Hebrew script. It runs from right to left, whereas most scripts in western languages run from left to right. It looks as if the ancient Hebrew “Quadrat Schrift” was designed for right-handed people only. Fresh letters made in this fashion remain wet for a short period, and when the scribe finishes his letter, he touches the still-damp broad stroke again, which then fills with the ink still adhering to his pen. By doing so, the letter gets a darker tint—more ink—then when it was penned down with a single stroke.
22
Figure 12. Sequence of writing the letter T by a Hebrew scribe (1-5). A and B are the lines incised in the parchment to facilitate writing. Date palm stalk The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) starts with a single hairy trunk, which is usually trimmed. The tree may vary in height from 2 to 10 meters. From the trunk spring several branches, which are always triangular at their base. The trunk has a pattern of oval-shape stumps of about 12 cm in diameter. From a distance the lower trunk of the tree looks stubbly.
Figure 12. A date palm (left), its fruits in the middle and its stalks (right).
23
Figure 13. Date palm with remains of trimmed branches at left, including the hairy wiring between the stubs. At right, the camera has zoomed in to show the hairy consistency of a date palm branch stub The date palm stalk type of pen was already in use in Egypt, where Flinders Petrie described a pen case with pens containing various colors of ink and paint. With it was found a pen made of palm fiber (Petrie 1927, 65; pl. LVII). Every branch of a date palm tree at the Dead Sea starts at about 45 degrees upwards from a hairy trunk with stumps. The shape of a branch is like a paddle of a rowing boat, wide at the root of the branch, but ending in a fine point at the other side. The branch has long V-shaped leaves. The upper triangular side as well as the lower part of each branch, green/yellow in color, and rounded whereas the bottom angles are fine and sharp. The diameter of the branch near the trunk is almost oval, as you can see where a branch was cut off. The branches are orientated to encircle the trunk, connecting with it at an angle of about 45 degrees. The canopy can be wide, sometimes to 5 meters. The branch’s lower extremity has a very smooth surface. At either of the two sides of such a branch, there are protruding stems or stalks, which can vary in length between 6 and 12 cm. and are usually 6-9 cm apart from one another. The shape of the stalk is triangular across the diameter, as we may observe in Figure 14. The stalk is smooth and very stiff, has a groove that some scholars describe as being excellent for ink flow, and ends in a rather sharp point.
Fig. 14. Virtual cut through the stalk (from the Schøyen Collection).
24
At around 100 cm from the stalks, a series of long sharp leaves grow out of the main branch-stem at both ends. The palm tree has no deep roots. Most of its roots penetrate the soil to only about 0.80-1.00 m. As for the strength of the roots, what they lack in depth is made up by their width, which can amount to a diameter of 3-4 meters. The flexibility of a palm tree is due to the long hairy fibers of which the entire tree is made. Because of this, the tree bends easily in the wind without breaking. It is difficult to saw into planks because the fibers grow lengthwise. Specifically in ancient times it would have been almost impossible to saw it. It would also have been difficult to use an axe on a palm tree. Thus, the tree would have been used as it was; in other words, the entire beam was used as a pillar or as a part of a ceiling or as a floor of the first or second story. To support this theory, I refer to the Qumran find of large iron nails, some 20 cm long, which fastened the palm tree trunks to one another. The nails are far too big for a door or a table. I envision that due to the lack of a saw and the difficulty of sawing a palm tree length-wise, the entire tree was used and with it the long nails. In February 2004, Martin Schøyen published part of his Qumran relics, among which was a stylus obtained from Kando in the late 1950s. He dubbed it a “palm-pen.” S. Goranson in an email to Peter Daniels suggested that the correct name for this type of stylus would be a “date palm pen.” The find of such a pen is possible since dates were cultivated 2,000 years ago at Qumran, as the large amount of harvested kernels testifies. Also today, there are large groves of date palms near Qumran. Daniels’ answered that such a pen should be stiff and hollow. Nevertheless, I found that the first characteristic of being stiff is true for the date palm stalk, but the second parameter of being hollow is lacking altogether; the stalk is massive and has no hole down the middle, as the quarterdiameter reed pen in Fig. 14 proves. The few photographs that we have of a stylus found at Qumran by R. de Vaux all have in common that they are of the same type as the one published by Schøyen in 2004 (Puech and others). We know from the literature and the excavations at Hellenistic and Roman sites in Egypt and the Middle East that scribes used reed pens to write on papyrus, parchment, textile and leather. Nevertheless, one has not found reed pens in Qumran. Pointed remains of wood, even with a black residue, have been found, but it is unlikely that the Dead Sea scrolls were written with these sticks. To speak plainly, it does not work, as I experienced when I tried it first. Can one write with a date palm stalk? Let us start with the bottom line that in principle one is indeed able to write with a date-palm stalk. We will look at how to shape it into a pen and at the same time what the difficulties are.
25 As already mentioned, the stalk has a groove that might have been useful in keeping ink from emptying itself onto parchment, papyrus or paper, as some have stated. The latter sentence concludes the advantages that can be mentioned in favor of the stalk pen. We need a split tip that facilitates the ink flow. When I made a cut and split the stalk’s end, a hairy tip became visible because the stalk is, like the date palm itself, hairy. Used for writing with, such an implement would rather soon become a brush instead of a pen, and unfit for purpose. If I may suggest a use for such a stalk, I would say it could have been used to write on ceramic to create an ostracon, when the pointed end of the stalk would soon become a paintbrush because of its hairy consistency. The stalk of the date palm has recently often been mentioned, since a stalk from Qumran has been exhibited on the Schøyen Collection website. Since then, various serious scholars have been occupied with the possibility that the scribe at Qumran wrote the scrolls with a date palm stalk. Besides the fact that I have always doubted whether writing with the aid of a stalk was possible, I finally presented this theory to various people who write with different tools and media and they told me that it was indeed impossible to write with such a pen. Initially, I tried to write with the stalk myself. I succeeded in writing, but it was impossible to get a neat script. My reasons to exclude the possibility of writing with the help of a stalk are based on the common sense of a layman and it is interesting to see what a skilled scribe can tell us. The Schøyen date palm stalk In order to see whether a Torah scroll scribe would have been able to write with a date palm stalk, I submitted the problem to Rabbi Moshe Zarum, who writes Torah scrolls on a regular basis. I asked him to write a text using the stalk I had taken from a date palm around the Dead Sea. Rabbi Zarum first tested the firmness as well as the flexibility of the stalk, which are both needed for a pen, and yes, he approved it. He told me that the stalk groove or channel at one side of the stalk was not enough for writing. Such a groove could prevent ink from emptying itself onto parchment or paper, but that was all. When the stalk was used “as is,” any pressure on a sheet would result in blots of ink because you would be unable to master the ink flow by just using the pressure of your hand. Thus, he placed the stalk on an steel plate and undid it from its tip with a sharp knife. The remaining tip had a round form and Zarum started to pare first the upper and then the lower side of the stalk where the groove is located, until a very thin tip remained of 7 mm long, 2 mm wide and 1 mm thick. Then he trimmed the chisel-like tip into a pointed tip. After this, he split the stalk tip into two identical thin slits each 1 mm wide. In order to suit it to his hand (he is right-handed), he made an additional perpendicular cut of 25 degrees and the pen was ready, see Figure 15.
26
Figure 15. Close-up of the stalk pen as is and the one made into a pen and used for writing. On the right the close-up of the right stalk shaped into a pen. Rabbi Zarum then dipped the date palm stalk pen into an inkwell and started to write. Slowly I saw Hebrew letters appear on a paper sheet in front of him, as shown in Figure 16.
Figure 16. Scribe at work using a palm stalk pen (left) and its use for writing Hebrew letters on a paper sheet (right) I asked him to comment on the writing and how easy it was to handle the stalk pen. It was obvious that the text came out as was expected from a skilled scribe, but the stalk would suit a child’s hand better, Zarum told me, since an adult would find it difficult to write with a steady hand using such a thin, narrow and small pen. In other words, in theory, although unlikely, manuscripts could have been copied by young people who were able to use date palm stalk pens because of the size of their small hands. One thing became clear: the Schøyen stalk, depicted in Figure 16B&C could not have been used for writing, because it was not shaped into a pen, which as described above would have been necessary. One cannot write with a stalk that still has its original, natural tip, i.e. without the split
27 and the cut upper extreme. I do not want to speculate on the vendor of this stalk, Kando, who probably was misinformed by his Bedouin friends. Rabin published that the Schøyen stalk has ink at its extremity, because it is black color (Rabin 2017). Nevertheless, I maintain that black tips on stalks are no sign of ink, because the stalks still growing on the tree already have a black tip. Besides that, I examined the stalk in the Schøyen collection when I was at Martin Schøyen’s mansion and it shows no sign of having been in contact with ink. A stalk tip discolors even when still on its tee branch, as any leaf does eventually. A second use for a stalk could have been as a brush for writing with ink on a pottery shard, an ostracon. Qumran had about 80 ostraca and the text could easily have been applied with the help of a stalk that wore itself slowly down by contact with a rough ceramic surface.
A
B
C Figure 17. Two fresh stalks from date palm trees at the modern (2010) Qumran site (A) compared to the Schøyen Collection stalk (B). Note the black tips on the freshly plucked stalks in (A); the Schøyen stalk has no remains of a black residue. The real length of all the stalks is the same, including the Schøyen stalk. The lower photograph(C) is a copy of the one above it (B) but the intensity of the colors has been diminished using computer software to accentuate the lack of the
28 black tip on the Schøyen stalk pen. As is shown, fresh stalks, almost all, have a tip, which is black even when growing on the tree, as shown in Figure 18.
Figure 18. Brown and black tips on living date palm tree stalks. Ink analyses using analytical techniques Ink analysis trials were already underway in 1955 during the excavation of Qumran. To summarize the trials: already in 1955, during the excavations at Qumran, Plenderleith (1955, 39) was interested in the ink and analyzed it by spectroscopic techniques. He was the first to show that the ink was basically a carbon with traces of Ca, Mn, Fe, Cu, Sn, Pb and Ag. His data were finally published in 1968 (Steckoll 1968, 91). June 4, 1956 D e a d Se a p ar c hme nt re s e a r ch i n cl u d ing i nk by Donald Burton, R. Reed and M.J. Wood appears in letters to which I have been given access by the daughter (Judy Brown) of the archaeologist John Allegro which I will publish in Chapter 12 of “I am in Trans” webversion 2018. Since 2006, two new teams, one lead by Jan Gunneweg at the ESRF in Grenoble and the other by Oliver Hahn et al. at Berlin, brought Dead Sea scroll research to the nuclear level (Gunneweg and Balla, INAA, Budapest) as well as to the light source level (ESRF, Grenoble) by using synchrotronbased analyses of ink and parchment by X-ray and FTIR. Of the Berlin Team, O. Hahn et al. (2011 and 2009) have tried to trace the origin of the Dead Sea scrolls by analyzing ink and parchment according to the ratio of Cl/Br which is, as they claim, characteristic for the Dead Sea only. I shall comment on this claim in chapter 12 below, since I am not of the same opinion on what the Berlin team published.
29
It is our duty to come up with new hypotheses of how the parchment and ink was made in the second Temple period, but hypotheses are not enough. We have to prove them through science with its analytical techniques, whereby the tests can be redone at various laboratories and with various sorts of ink and parchment made by different scientists and equipment. PIXE analyses of Qumran parchment (Kusko 1985 and Nir-el & Broshi 1996, 157) showed high concentrations of Cl, K, Ca and Br, as would be expected if the skins were depilated (dehaired) and tanned with the use of salt water from the Dead Sea, which has high levels of these elements, as Haran claims (Haran 1985, 21). It was argued that due to the hygroscopic nature of alkali and alkaline earth metals, the moisture content of the Dead Sea scrolls would increase, denaturing the parchment collagen to gelatin and thus weakening the parchment (Nir-El 1996, 157; Lukas 1962, 38). From this argument one gets the strong impression that the organizer of the ink research at Berlin was heavily influenced by quotes from Plenderleith, Steckoll, Haran and Nir-El/Broshi into taking their results as established facts, which they were not.
References. Humbert, J-B. & Gunneweg, J. 2003, Khirbet Qumrân et 'Aïn Feshkha, II.3 Studies of Anthropology, Physics and Chemistry (Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus, Series Archaeologica 3), Academic Press University of Fribourg /Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, Chapter 12 pp. 277288 Naissance de l’ecriture, 1982, cuneiformes et hieroglyphes, galeries nationales du Grand Palais May 7- Aug 9 1982, Ministere de la reunion des musees nationaux (Leicknam, B, A. Ziegler, Ch. Editors), Paris. de Vaux, R. 1979, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, 1959). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973 de Vaux 1956: 1979 Goranson, S. 1991 Michmanim pp. 110-111 Hahn, O. Rabin, I., Kanngiesser, b., Malzer, W., Mantouvalou, I., Schade, U., Masic, A. 2009, Non-destructive Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Online version) Mantouvalou, I. Wolff, T., Hahn, O., Rabin, I., Luehl, L., Pagels, M,. Malzer, W., Kanngiesser, B. 2011, 3D Micro-XRF for Cultural Heritage Objects: New Analysis Strategies for the Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Analytical Chemistry Broshi, M., T.A. Cahill, R. A. Eldred, and R. N. Schwab. 1985. Unpublished results of PIXE analyzes at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, University of California, Davis.
30
De Vaux, R. 1954. Fouilles au Khirbet Qumran-Rapport preliminaire sur la deuxieme campagne. Revue Biblique 61: 214. Haran, M. 1985. Bible Scrolls in Eastern and Western Jewish Communities from Qumran to the High Middle Ages. HUCA 56: 21-65. Humbert, J-B. & Gunneweg, J. eds. 2003. Khirbet Qumran et Ain Feshkha II, Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus, Series Archaeologica 3. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Leicknam, B, A. Ziegler, Ch.(Editors} Catalogue, 1982, Naissance de l’ecriture, cuneiformes et hieroglyphes, galeries nationales du Grand Palais May 7- Aug 9 1982, Ministere de la reunion des musees nationaux , Paris. Lukas, A. and J. R. Harris. 1962. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, Edward Arnold, London, 38 Müller, M., Murphy, B. Burghammer, M. Riekel, C. Pantos, E. and Gunneweg, J. 2007. Ageing of native cellulose fibers under archaeological conditions: Textiles from the Dead Sea region studied using X-ray micro diffraction. Appl. Phys. A 89: 877-81. Murphy, B., Cotte, M., Müller, M., Balla M., and Gunneweg, J. Degradation of Parchment and Ink of the Dead Sea scrolls investigated using Synchrotron-based X-ray and Infrared Microscopy, in “Holistic Qumran” (Gunneweg, Adriaens & Dik, Ed) Chap. 7, pp.77-98, Brill, Leiden Nir-El, Y and M. Broshi. 1996. Dead Sea Discoveries 3: 158-67. Plenderleith, H.J. 1955. Qumran Cave 1. In DJD I, ed. D. Barthelemy and J.T.Milik, 39-40. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rabin, I.,Hahn, O., Wolff, T.,Kindzorra, E., Masic, A., Schade, U., Weinberg, G. 2010 Characterization of the writing media of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in: Holistic Qumran (Gunneweg, Adriaens, Dik eds) Chapter nine, pp 123-134. Brill, Leiden
Steckoll, S. H. 1968. Investigations of the ink in writing the Dead Sea scrolls. Nature 220:91-92 Zali, A & Berthier, A 1997, L’Aventure des ecritures, Naissances, pp.106/7. Bibliotheque natonale de France
