They also discovered a partially mummified 6,000-year-old skeleton of a child.
March 16, 2021
Archeologists Hagay Hamer and Oriah Amichai sifting through finds at the Cave of Horrors. Photo by Eitan Klein, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
For the first time in 60 years, archaeologists have discovered a new fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a cache of ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts uncovered in the Qumran Caves on the northern shore of the Dead Sea.
The Israel Antiquities Authority, which carried out the excavations, believes the new scroll, written in Greek, is actually a missing part of the “Book of the 12 Minor Prophets” scroll, first discovered in 1961. It contains verses from Zechariah 8:16-17 and Nahum 1:5-6. The minor differences in the wording compared to other known manuscripts are important in helping shape our understanding of the evolution of the standardized Hebrew Bible.