April 26, 1996. Copyright, 1996, Graphic News. All rights reserved

DEAD SEA SCROLLS ON THE NET
By Laura Spinney, Science Editor

LONDON, April 26, Graphic News - Researchers all over the world can now study the Dead Sea Scrolls, or at least a tenth century version of them, without having to travel to the Cambridge University Library where they are held. The ancient documents have been posted on the World Wide Web for all those with access to the Internet to see.

The scrolls, which are thought to be around 2000 years old, were unearthed from the caves of Qumran on the northwest shores of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. They are believed to have comprised the library of a Jewish community called the Essenes who were contemporaries of the early Christians, and the thousands of fragments that remain provide a detailed picture of everyday life, rituals, prayer and religious conflict from that time. They are also important because they contain large proportions of the oldest known Hebrew bible, or Old Testament.

The theological manuscripts that are now on the World Wide Web date back to the ninth or tenth centuries and were discovered in Cairo by two British scholars, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, in 1896. They resemble the earlier scrolls closely and are significant in their own right because they show that the beliefs of the Qumran community survived them by at least nine hundred years. 	According to Dr Lionel Wickham of the faculty of divinity, University of Cambridge, much of what is written in the scrolls is mysterious. Scholars have tried to connect people mentioned in the manuscript fragments with known historical figures, but opinion varies on their identities. Now that images of the manuscripts are on the World Wide Web, many more researchers will be able to attempt to solve the mystery. "The scrolls still present problems for scholars, and the task of interpretation goes on," says Wickham.
/ENDS