A real 2,000-year-old copper list of hidden temple treasure, never found
The scholar Robert Cargill puts it bluntly: the Copper Scroll is not mysterious. We know what it says and we know what it purports to be, which is a list of buried treasure. His essay is titled On the Insignificance and the Abuse of the Copper Scroll, and the abuse he means is the use of it by treasure hunters.
The document is genuinely strange in every other way. It came out of Cave 3 near Khirbet Qumran with the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but where those are parchment and papyrus, this one is metal: copper alloyed with about one per cent tin. No metallic copper survives in it now. Centuries beside the Dead Sea turned the whole thing to brittle oxide, and what are called the two scrolls are really two halves of a single original about 2.4 metres long, cut apart because it could not be unrolled.
It is not literature. It is a list of 64 locations where gold and silver were said to have been buried or hidden. Its Hebrew is closer to the language of the Mishnah than to the literary Hebrew of the other scrolls, its spelling is different, its letter forms are different, and it dates to somewhere around 50 to 100 CE, overlapping only with the very latest of the other Qumran manuscripts.
Being that anomalous has cost it attention. Cargill's point is that scholars have pushed the scroll to the margins precisely because it does not fit, leaving the field to people looking for the gold.
It has been on display at the Jordan Museum in Amman since 2013.
The caves of Qumran, by the Dead Sea (West Bank)
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
