The Treasure List Carved in Copper

On March 14, 1952, at the back of Cave 3 near Khirbet Qumran, archaeologists made a discovery unlike anything else they had pulled from the Judean desert. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls had been found by Bedouins and were made of parchment or papyrus, but this one was different in every way: two corroded rolls of copper, mixed with about one percent tin, so brittle after centuries of oxidation that they could not be unrolled by hand. It was the fifteenth and last scroll recovered from that cave, and so it earned the catalog name 3Q15 — the Copper Scroll.

Because the metal could not simply be uncoiled like leather, the Jordanian government, on the recommendation of archaeologist John Marco Allegro, shipped the scroll to Manchester University's College of Technology in England. There, in 1955 and 1956, Professor H. Wright Baker carefully cut the sheets into 23 curved strips, finally revealing that the two rolls were actually one continuous document, originally about 2.4 metres long. Allegro, who supervised the cutting, transcribed the exposed text immediately, eager to know what secret had been worth engraving in metal rather than writing on skin.

What emerged was not scripture, poetry, or commentary like the other Qumran scrolls. It was a list — 64 locations describing where quantities of gold and silver, along with other valuable items, were buried or hidden. Nothing like it existed among the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls collection, and nothing like the treasure it described has ever been recovered.

The scroll's language added to its strangeness. Its Hebrew resembled Mishnaic Hebrew far more than the literary Hebrew used in the Bible or in the other Qumran texts, meaning scholars struggled to translate vocabulary that appears nowhere else in ancient writing. Its orthography and letter forms were unusual too, likely shaped by the physical act of hammering and chiseling words into copper rather than writing with ink on parchment. Strangely, seven of the location names are followed by clusters of two or three Greek letters, which some researchers believe represent numerical values — and the structure of its 'clauses' echoes inventory lists known from Greek temple archives, such as those from the Temple of Apollo.

The scroll's official publication became a tangle of competing claims. Józef Milik was originally assigned to edit the text and at first suspected it was Essene folklore rather than a real historical record. He later reversed himself, concluding the scroll wasn't a product of the Qumran community at all — it was found deeper in the cave, separated from the other scrolls, suggesting it had been deposited at a different time. Meanwhile, in 1957 and again later, Jordanian antiquities officials pushed Allegro to publish before Milik did; Allegro released his own edition with hand-drawn transcriptions in 1960, and Milik followed with his official edition in 1962, though its accompanying photographs were nearly unreadable.