ABSTRACT
when the 373Israelis made their way into Old Jerusalem on June 5, 1967, they found that the Palestine Archaeological Museum, in which the later batches of scrolls had been kept and studied, was being used as a fortress by the Jordanian defenders. It was one of the prime objectives of the Israeli forces, and they had little difficulty in capturing it; their blue-and-white flag was flying on it from the noon of June 6th. When Dr. William G. Dever, of the Hebrew Archaeological School in Israeli Jerusalem, got through to it, on June 12th, two days after the ceasefire, he found it, he says, pockmarked by bullets, and its tower, which had been used as a gun position, rather badly damaged. Inside, the showcases and the windows were smashed; the exhibits had been knocked about, and some of them had been broken. The bodies of several Israeli soldiers were lying inside and in the courtyard. There was now a sign at the entrance that announced it was a museum of the State of Israel. The scrolls were not found at first, and it was thought that they had been taken away, but they were later discovered in a safe in the wall, against which a display case had been moved. An inventory was made of the fragments, which had been fitted together by the scholars and fixed between sheets of glass, and everything, apparently, had been collected, with the exception of the strips of the copper scrolls, which had long before been sent to Amman, the capital of Jordan.
