The Dead Sea Scrolls

Headed off to the Jordan Museum after breakfast. About a 15 minute walk and, embarrassingly, turned out to be the building that we stood outside yesterday when we were lost, trying to work out how to get back to our hotel. Well, now we know.

The museum is really good, and really new, having only been opened in November. Only the ground floor is ready, but it is a really impressive themed display that weaved the history of the Bedouin people throughout the stone age, bronze age and iron age, as well as through the Assyrian and Babylonian periods, the Nabateans (who built Petra as their capital), Alexander the Great, and the Roman domination, then the Byzantine (Christian) period which gave way to the Islamic conquest, the fall of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire, and the founding of the modern Jordanian state in 1948. Whew!

Still to come is the full second floor, and the adjacent children's interactive space but, at least for the moment, it's free which was a bonus.

The big attraction is some of the Dead Sea Scrolls being on display. Some of the earliest known surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in sealed pottery vessels in caves in the Qumran area near the shores of the Dead Sea by Bedouin from 1946 onwards.

This is where it gets a bit murky. Initially the Bedouin shepherds found seven scrolls in a cave, and didn't quite know what to do with them, so they passed them around a bit, and split them up to various buyers for a few dollars, until they realised that they were valuable. Then they wouldn't tell anybody where they found them, so expedition teams and the Bedouin engaged in a race to hunt for things that the Bedouin had originally missed, and between them they found several more caves.

Now, at the time, this was all in Jordan, but in time honoured tradition a war broke out between the Jordanians and the Israelis over the West Bank, making it too dangerous to continue excavation. Israel ended up winning the Six Day War in 1967, so the caves were now in Israeli hands, and they controlled (or rather stopped) the excavations for a time.

Not being able to search for more, the Jordanian government attempted to buy up those fragments that were now in private hands, but couldn't afford to do so, so they asked for loans to assist them. It's one of the things that I like about the Jordanians, that they are independent and self sufficient, and unlike many other countries, are proud of the fact that they have now paid back all of these loans.

It's these purchased fragments that are on display in the museum, or at least the ones that have survived as private collectors are nowhere near as careful as national museums. There are also some copper parchments that had to be sawn apart to expose the texts inside, and some of the pottery vessels in which they were found.

As a contrast, we then took a taxi from the museum to the newest shopping mall in Jordan to do a spot of retail therapy. Whilst the mall was lovely, it was also really disappointing. You could have been in any Australian mall. For the first time in the country, we had all the usual international brand shops, at international prices of course, so we bought nothing but lunch. The really big disappointment was the ice skating rink in the middle of the mall. We noticed that everybody there were such terrible skaters, until we realised that they were trying to skate on a white painted wooden floor!

Back to the hotel, then out to Jafra Restaurant again, our favourite haunt, for another cheap and lovely dinner. We're getting to be known there. They now shake hands with us when we arrive.