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Comment by ilimilku | Hacker News Reader

The "big picture" background here is that the scholarly consensus, established prematurely before all but the scrolls in the 1st cave were found, was that they belonged to an Essene "monastic" settlement at the ruins of Khirbet Qumran nearby. This has been challenged in a number of ways, yet the consensus of the local, Essene origin remains in tact. A Jerusalem origin hypothesis was developed principally by Norman Golb and advanced by a few others, yet the history of Scrolls scholarship has proven to be nasty to say the least. This new evidence, while saying little in the grand scheme, does possibly hint at a non-Dead Sea, i.e. Jerusalem origin of the scrolls.

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Not a historian so I may be missing something, but how would one possibly differentiate between the origin being the Dead Sea or Jerusalem based on things like materials used? I mean, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea are less than 35km apart (according to google). Even thousands of years ago, it would have been a non-issue to transport materials or techniques between these two locations. I can't imagine that our knowledge of scroll-making at the time is so specific that we could possibly rule out a craftsman taking a camel from one location to another.

Agreed. An ancient document storage pit was found (in Iraq?) which was the records of a merchant over several generations. It included trading records from many surrounding settlements. From the time of Hammurabi.

Yeah the scale of trade always seems to surprise everyone. It's hard for me often to understand how folks draw the archaeological lines here.

Materials could have been traded and the scrolls written near the Dead Sea ... or even folks from the Dead Sea traveled to Jerusalem, used local materials and made some scrolls, and traveled back.

I think it's instructive to consider bronze. To make bronze you need copper, which is very common, and tin, which isn't. Tin was only mined in a small handful of locations around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancie...

So from that, it's clear to see that extensive trading networks were necessary for these civilizations, not just for luxuries like exotic herbs and spices, but their basic industrial needs.

Well not exactly true; you can use Arsenic instead of Tin and there is evidence that they certainly did use it; I am not sure of the breakdown of ancient tin-Bronze vs arsenic Bronze in use. In any case your point still stands as we also know there was tin bronze in use and likely much of it may have come from the British isles.

Would arsenic bronze have any added toxic effects?

More to the people producing it than using it. But metallurgy and mining must have been awfully dangerous industries to be in back then regardless of the arsenic.

I was thinking more along the lines of "added weapon poison damage", ex. https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/99646/can-...

Seems that lethal dose for arsenic is likely too high to be transmitted by even a pure arsenic trioxide blade, unless it was manufactured with the intent of leaving bits inside the wound, like maybe a blade a rough brittle surface to leave grit. Even so, would have to introduce ~50+mgs worth, which sees like a tall order.

Seems arsenic bronze is even less toxic, so probably not poisoning anyone. I wonder if the minor local toxicity of arsenic blade cuts would reduce the chance of the wound causing sepsis.

Perhaps an arsenic bronze arrow head broken off inside of somebody could poison them slowly over time.

You basically have to look at the availability and cost of transport of the goods. Salt was abundant in the Dead Sea area so the need to import salt would have been pretty low.

As for the movement of writers, or the scrolls post creation, you'd look at where scripts were generated and where they sourced their materials. Just speculating, as I haven't read the background material on this new discovery, but it would make sense that the monasteries in Jerusalem would have a reproducible sourcing process since they would be generating manuscripts often. Same would go for monasteries around the Dead Sea.

It's a good point, and the distinction is not one that most historians would deal with being more scientific in nature. However, in the long and heated debate about the scrolls' origins, scientific analysis of the scroll and jars has been offered.

Couple hours on a horse one way. I'm sure there were people who made the trip (and back) daily.

But, researchers have to find something to research or they're out of a job.

I went on an archeological dig in the area in June (as a tourist) and can answer part of this. Part of the answer is writing materials; in Jerusalem a variety of different things were used to make the writing materials, whereas the Dead Sea region, used a specific type of charcoal that was significantly softer than the charcoal found in the Jerusalem region.

Having been to both locations, I can easily say that they are extremely close (relatively speaking). People would walk MUCH longer distances than this at the time (ie Egypt to Bethlehem). There was also war, famine, an extremely lack of safety services, and an entirely different world back then. Storing things that were sacred or considered extremely important would have been placed in a safe location regardless of the distance (35 miles back then is like 2 miles for us now).

Specifically, one of the more likely theories is that a good number of these scrolls were deposited in the desert by various religious communities for safe keeping before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Yes, there was one article published a number of years ago (the author's name escapes me), who did a good job of parsing out the various communities that could have been responsible for certain caves, priests, Zealots, etc. I'm not sure it got much traction, but I found the exercise intriguing.

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