Fragments of a Biblical manuscript dating back to the last Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 135 AD Judaea, have been uncovered near the Dead Sea in what academics hailed Friday as a sensational discovery. After four decades with a dearth of new finds, archaeologists had resigned themselves to believing the desert caves in the modern-day West Bank had already yielded all their secrets from the Roman era.
"It's simply sensational, a dream come true," enthused archaeology professor Hanan Eshel, a Biblical specialist at Israel's Bar Ilan University.
For the past 20 years, he has scoured the Judaean desert around the Dead Sea, overturning stone after stone in search of Biblical parchments, only to be trumped by Bedouin who stumbled across the miniature fragments last August.
Only a few centimetres (not much more than an inch) long, the pieces contain extracts in Hebrew from the Biblical Book of Leviticus.
Damaged by bat droppings and lying under a film of dirt in a cave near the Ein Gedi oasis, the Bedouin pocketed the manuscripts and began an arduous bidding process with Professor Eshel.