A Bedouin pastor found the first of the ancient scrolls in 1947. He found them stored in pots in a cave in Qumran, near the northern tip of the Dead Sea. Some were sold to a monastery and others to an antiques dealer in Belém. Once their authenticity was established, archaeological expeditions and antiquities thieves followed and emptied the caves of everything they could find.
But decades later, the Judean desert still had more secrets to reveal.
Amid signs that thieves were still looking for and selling artifacts from the area, parts of which are difficult to reach and govern, Israeli officials decided to carry out a methodical and comprehensive survey of cliffs, gorges and caves as of 2017.
“Archeologists always chased thieves,” said Amir Ganor, who heads the Antiquities Authority’s burglary prevention unit. “We decided that maybe it was time to get ahead of the thieves.”
With the help of modern tools, such as drones, that can search all corners and nooks, three teams composed of four people, each mapped and searched about 80 kilometers of the cliff face along the Dead Sea.
Access to some of the caves would have been easier in ancient times. People knew how to navigate animal trails, Ganor said, and instead of rappelling, they would have used rope ladders to remote caves. But over 2,000 years, parts of the land collapsed, creating deep chasms.
The West Bank was under Jordanian control from 1948 until Israel captured the area in the 1967 Middle East war. It is now divided between Israeli control and partial Palestinian control. But the 1967 border did not exist in antiquity, Ganor said, and archaeologists treated the Judean desert as a unit for the purposes of the research.
In the MurabBa’at caves, in what is now the West Bank, archaeologists have found a treasure trove of artifacts. This included the basket and a cache of rare coins from the days of the Bar Kokhba revolt, minted with Jewish symbols such as the harp and date palms.