ABSTRACT
In march, 1952, two mysterious scrolls of copper were found, one on top of the other, in one of the Dead Sea caves. They were evidently so brittle with oxidation that it was thought undesirable to try to unroll them. But the characters had been incised so deeply that it was possible, in reverse, to make out the outermost layer. Professor K. G. Kuhn of Gottingen, having studied them, came to the conclusion that they contained instructions for finding the buried treasure of the Essene monastery. Later on, one of these scrolls was sent to the Manchester College of Science and Technology in the hope that it might be possible to devise some method of opening them. This was managed in 1955-56 by Dr. h. Wright Baker, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who contrived a small circular saw which, cutting between the characters, sliced the scroll into strips that could be laid side by side and read. The second scroll was now sent on, and the pair proved to be two sections of the same document. This was deciphered by Mr. Allegro and turned out to be, indeed, directions for discovering a hidden treasure. These directions were rather crudely written, as if in haste, and it could not have been easy to use a stylus on copper, but it was probably thought safer to leave the message on copper rather than parchment, since the chances of preservation were better. Yet was it really the treasure of the 281monastery, whose inmates were supposed to have led so austere a life? There was a good deal of money involved, and vessels of gold and silver. These scrolls were found at some distance from fragments of broken jars, which suggested that they might have been deposited separately, Allegro came to believe that the Essenes had nothing to do with these scrolls except, no doubt, to allow them to be hidden in a cave near the monastery, and that the treasure was that of the Temple in Jerusalem, which the priests there had taken the precaution of putting out of the reach of the plundering Roman invaders, just as the Essenes had hidden their library.
