The Copper Scroll of Qumran and its sixty-four hiding places

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls there is one unlike any other. It is not written on parchment or papyrus, but engraved on thin sheets of copper. It contains no religious texts or community rules, but a list of places where gold, silver and sacred objects were supposedly hidden. It is the Copper Scroll, catalogued by scholars as 3Q15 and now kept at the Jordan Museum in Amman.

A find that was hard to open

The scroll was found in March 1952 in Cave 3 at Qumran, near the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, in two rolled and heavily oxidised pieces. It was impossible to unroll it without reducing it to fragments. After long discussions, in 1955 and 1956 it was cut into strips at the Manchester College of Science and Technology in England, with a saw specially set up for the operation.

The cutting finally made it possible to read the text, punched into the metal letter by letter with a pointed tool. Among the scholars involved in the early research was the Briton John Allegro, who published his own translation in 1960. The official edition, prepared by Józef Milik, appeared in 1962 in the series devoted to the finds of the Judaean Desert.

Sixty-four hiding places

The text lists sixty-four places, each with an indication of what was supposedly hidden there and, often, at what depth. The quantities of precious metal mentioned are enormous, so much so that some have calculated them in tens of tonnes. The places are described with references to cisterns, tombs, valleys and fortresses, but the names are often uncertain or cannot be identified on modern maps.

The language is a Hebrew close to that of the Mishnah, different from the literary Hebrew of the other Qumran scrolls, and some entries are accompanied by groups of Greek letters whose meaning is unclear. The dating, based mainly on the letter forms and the language, places it in the first century AD, although scholars' proposals vary by a few decades.

Real treasure or tradition?

The interpretations are many. Some scholars believe the scroll describes the treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem, hidden before the Roman destruction of AD 70. Others think of a legendary document, or a list of property belonging to the Qumran community. Even the relationship between the scroll and the other manuscripts found in the nearby caves is a matter of debate.

Despite numerous expeditions, no treasure matching the list has ever been found. The topographical directions, perhaps clear to the writer and his contemporaries, are today too vague to guide a search on the ground, and the landscape of the region has changed profoundly in almost two thousand years. Even the meaning of some of the text's technical terms is still debated.

The Copper Scroll combines two different fascinations: that of the ancient document and that of the treasure hunt. The choice of such a costly and durable material suggests that whoever engraved it wanted it to last, but its message has reached us without the key to truly understand it.