The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  a sense of guardianship and divine mission

  emphasis on the sun – brightness – light

  extreme ritualistic cleanliness

  stronger Egyptian influences.

  We might also expect some memory of the original holy city of Akhetaten. The catastrophic destruction of the Temple there would have inevitably left a deep scar on their subconscious. Perhaps, in the extreme, there might also remain some knowledge of the whereabouts of the treasures buried at Akhetaten, or the treasures that Moses and the priests brought out of Egypt.

  It would in itself be quite surprising if any of these listed characteristics were found amongst the Essenes – especially that of Egyptian influences – after so long a period of immersion in a foreign culture and a refined Judaism that had ‘cleansed itself’ of as many foreign influences as possible. One would certainly not expect to see more Egyptian influence within a closed sect than was apparent in the common body of Judaism. But we do. In fact, we find the Essenes exhibited many of the characteristics of the priests that came out of Egypt, modified by time in just the form that one might expect.

  There are not just ‘fingerprints’ of the connection between Akhenaten and the Qumran-Essenes, there are ‘smoking guns’!

  Before going into the ‘religious fingerprints’, I have uncovered some intriguing visual and pictorial links to Egypt and the City of Akhetaten, which are quite surprising.

  ORIENTATIONS AT QUMRAN

  The following very strange coincidences give us visual links between the Qumran-Essenes and Akhenaten. So strange are these links that I do not think they are mere accidents of chance. I believe they constitute a body of evidence that, on its own, clinches the connection between the Qumran-Essenes and Pharaoh Akhenaten. Before reading the next paragraph, turn to the plate section of illustrations and look closely at Plate 10 (bottom) – the hills above the Qumran settlement. What can you see?

  When I first noticed the images, I thought I was dreaming. The photograph was printed in a book entitled The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, first published in 1992. No-one previously seems to have noticed what I hope you have seen for yourself. Amongst the Mount Rushmore-like shapes in the hills directly above Qumran there appear to be faces. For me, these elongated faces look remarkably like ancient Egyptians. If that is what they are, what on earth are they doing staring out over the ruins of a Jewish settlement on the Dead Sea? There are only three reasonable explanations. They were carved, possibly by members of the Essene community; they are the result of weathering and are quite accidental; or they are the work of the hand of God. On closer examination I believe the faces are the result of weathering, but nevertheless their existence is quite unnerving!

  The New Jerusalem

  The ‘orientation’ story now shifts back to the Congress held in Jerusalem in July 1997, to celebrate the fiftieth year of the finding of the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some 300 delegates, including experts from all over the world, gathered in the magnificent setting of the Israel Museum grounds where the Shrine of the Book is located, to indulge in an academic freudenfest of learned exchanges.

  One of the papers presented at the Congress was given by Joerg Frey, an academic from Tübingen, Germany.12 His specialism was the so-called ‘New Jerusalem’ text, which comprises six manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Written mainly in Aramaic, they are considered by most scholars to relate to the description of an idealized city that might exist in an eschatalogical period at the end of time and are identified with the visionary writings of Ezekiel 40–48 (and to Revelations 21).

  However, there are serious problems with this identification. The texts (which do not actually mention the word ‘Jerusalem’) describe a much larger city than Ezekiel’s and cannot be easily related to a plan of Jerusalem at any time in its history. As Herr Frey put it, the plan of the ‘New Jerusalem’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls is difficult to understand and it is unclear from where the people who wrote these particular Qumran-Essene documents got their ideas. A clue was not long in coming.

  My ears pricked up when a delegate in the audience commented during question time that a number of researchers, including Shlomo Margalit, Georg Klostermann and Ulrich Luz, had studied the ‘New Jerusalem’ texts in the 1980s.13 They had compared the city plan descriptions in the texts with actual cities in the ancient Near East and had come up with a ‘best fit’ of…Akhetaten! The same Akhetaten that was Pharaoh Akhenaten’s holy city on the Nile, situated in lower Egypt, now know as El-Amarna.

  If this assertion was correct, what clearer evidence could there be that the Qumran-Essenes knew the plan of a city that existed 1,100 years before their time? A city that had been made desolate very soon after the death of Akhenaten in 1332 BCE, resettled in Romano-Ptolomaic times and then long-since abandoned and forgotten.

  I decided to look at translations of the original ‘New Jerusalem’ texts myself and to make my own comparisons.

  Text 5Q15 of the ‘New Jerusalem’ texts, found in Cave 5 at Qumran, reads as follows:

  [round] = 357 cubits to each side. A passage surrounds the block of houses, a street gallery, three reeds = 21 cubits (wide). [He] then [showed me the di]mensions of [all] the blo[cks of houses. Between each block there is a street], six reeds = 42 cubits wide. And the width of the avenues running from east to west; two of them are ten reeds = 70 cubits wide. And the third, that to the [lef]t (i.e. north) of the temple, measures 18 reeds = 126 cubits in width. And the wid[th of the streets] running from south [to north: t]wo of [them] have nine reeds and four cubits = 67 cubits, each street. [And the] mid[dle street passing through the mid]dle of the city, its [width measures] thirt[een] ree[ds] and one cubit = 92 cubits. And all [the streets of the city] are paved with white stone…marble and jasper.14

  The Dead Sea Scroll texts conceive the city as covering an area of 25–28km2, an area very similar to that of the city of Akhetaten, as revealed through excavations.15 The style and formula of presenting measurements is also quite similar to that used at the time of the city’s existence, exemplified in an inscription on a boundary stela, stela ‘S’, found at El-Amarna, which describes the dimensions of the Akhetaten site.16

  Excavations at El-Amarna by Sir Flinders Petrie,17 Professor Geoffey Martin18 and, more recently, by Barry Kemp of the Egypt Exploration Society, show that Akhetaten had three main streets running east/west, and three running north/south, almost exactly as described in the Dead Sea Scroll texts. The streets were unusually wide for an ancient city, being between 30m and 47m in width, again closely corresponding to measurements in the ‘New Jerusalem’ texts, as do the distances between the blocks of houses.

  The descriptions of streets ‘paved with white stone…marble and jasper’ are especially noteworthy. Akhetaten was the ‘beautiful gleaming white city’ of Egypt. Built on virgin land in a vast sandy plain that formed a natural hill-surrounded amphitheatre on the banks of the Nile, no expense had been spared in its construction. Roads, pavements and buildings were made of the finest available materials. An exquisite example of the craftsmanship that was lavished on the city can be seen in the painted pavings that adorned Akhetaten’s main palace, reconstructed in the Cairo Museum. A glowingly beautiful piece showing a blue, green, yellow and red marshland setting for a duck-like bird can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  By all accounts the city must have gleamed white in the sunlight, its roads and buildings made from limestone, which had the appearance of alabaster.19

  The ‘Jerusalem text’ goes on to describe the dimensions of a huge building, and various houses in the city. A comparison of the archaeological reports of the Great Temple at Akhetaten indicates that this is the building the texts are describing.

  A recent comprehensive study of the New Jerusalem Scroll, by Michael Chyutin, also concludes that the city plan of Akhetaten appeared to form a template for the Qumran-Essenes’s idealized vision of their Holy City.20 However, the author can only speculate on th
e reason for the association: ‘Why did the author of the Scroll describe a city planned in an archaic Egyptian style, rather than describing a Greek city or a Roman castrum?’

  The work by Shlomo Margalit and his colleagues, by Michael Chyutin, and my own cross-checking can leave little doubt that the Qumran-Essenes had in their possession works handed down from previous guardians of their literature, which must have been composed within living memory of 1300 BCE (the date the city of Akhetaten is thought to have been destroyed by Pharaoh Haremhab).21 They knew exact details about the geographical layout of Akhetaten, details that appear in no other source.

  If the Qumran-Essenes knew the layout of what I believe they considered as their model ‘holy city’, did they make use of that knowledge in other ways? Was there a connection to the Copper Scroll? Clearly the knowledge of the city layout would have been useful to them in visualizing the whereabouts of some of the treasures described in the Copper Scroll. The city plan was, after all, a reference grid for the description of where some of the treasures were hidden. But there is more.

  If, as I surmise, the Qumran-Essenes knew the direction and layout of their ‘holy city’, wouldn’t they have made use of that knowledge when they came to build their own ‘holy settlement’? It would be surprising if it had not had some influence on their constructions. The initial site correspondences were there – a flat area, near to water, backed by hills.

  Look at Figure 14 on page 152. The geographical alignment of the Qumran settlement is approximately north-west. If we overlay the reconstructed outline plan of the Great Temple at Akhetaten on the outline plan of the settlement at the Qumran site, we find the walls of both buildings are in exact geographical alignment. The main walls of both buildings are parallel. This is weird. The fit is so precise, it cannot be a matter of chance. Almost as incredible is how did the Qumran builders achieve this accuracy in alignment over such a vast distance, even if they had wanted to? Whether some solar, stellar or other comparator was employed must remain the subject of another study.

  Figure 13: Site of Akhetaten showing outline plan of streets and buildings.

  As I have shown before, relating numbers, size and alignment was an important preoccupation and skill of ancient civilizations, particularly for the Egyptians, but how the Essenes managed to achieve such an accuracy in this instance is a mystery.

  Figure 14: Overlay of the Great Temple at Akhetaten on the plan of Essene buildings at Qumran showing the parallel orientation.

  Orientation for Egyptians was vitally important. Buildings were not just put up randomly. They were positioned with extreme precision in relation to other constructions and natural heavenly bodies. Dimensions and angles of the actual construction were also carefully programmed. For these reasons when a concurrence of angles, dimensions or alignments is discovered it is immensely significant. The alignment of an aperture or shaft in a building so that sun or starlight could illuminate a desired position at some precise required time is repeated in many settings. A couple of examples will illustrate the point.

  Mark Vidler’s book, The Star Mirror, shows that the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza were able to measure star angles to an accuracy of ‘one arc minute’, and used isosceles triangular alignments of pyramids on the Giza plateau to mirror isosceles triangular configurations of stars, to highlight special dates in the calendar.22

  Another example relates to the Great Temple built by Ramses II at Abu Simbel, in southern Egypt. It was deliberately built in such a way that twice a year, on the 22 February (the date of his birthday) and on the 22 October (the date of his coronation), the sun shines directly over the holy shrine, illuminating the Pharaoh’s throne.23

  The ‘singing statue’ is our last example. Two huge statues of Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep III can still be seen in front of the Valley of the Kings, on the west bank at Thebes. When Strabo, the Greek first century BCE writer, visited the site, he recorded that every morning when the first rays of the sun struck one of the statues, it let out an audible singing note, which he was at a loss to explain.24

  The Qumran Cemetery

  In May 1998 Dr Timothy Lim, Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, organized an international conference on ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls in their Historical Context’. The conference was held in the architecturally grandiose Faculty of Divinity building, adjacent to the old Assembly Hall of Edinburgh (where the new Scottish Parliament will hold its initial meetings).25

  The first presentation was given by Professor E. P. Sanders, of Duke University in America, and during the discussion the question came up of why all the bodies of the Essenes in the graveyard at Qumran were buried with their heads facing south.

  The large main cemetery at Qumran faces east and is some 50m from the site of the settlement, in between the settlement and the Dead Sea. Some 1,100 graves have so far been identified. They are arranged in neat, close-ordered rows, contrasting to the usual disorder of cemeteries in ancient Palestine. The graves are simple dug-out trenches marked by a small pile of loose stones. To date about fifty-five graves have been excavated, and from the random choice of excavation, it is statistically certain that all the bodies in the main cemetery are male. Female and children’s bones were found in secondary cemeteries. All the human remains were buried naked, without adornments and with no worldly goods, apart from a few examples of ink pots and a mattock. The bodies were all buried lying on their backs, with their heads turned carefully in their graves to face south.26

  Neither Professor Sanders nor anyone in the audience had an explanation for this peculiarity. Jerusalem, the natural direction to face, was, after all, to the west. Absorbed in the repartee of the discussion I literally had to bite my lip to stop myself gushing forth with my own explanation: ‘South was the direction of the Qumran-Essenes’ “holy city” of Akhetaten!’

  Figure 15: Map showing the location of Qumran, and an enlarged view (inset ) of the site remains and cemetery.

  LINKS WITH AKHETATEN

  As we have seen from the ‘New Jerusalem’ Scroll, not only did the Qumran-Essenes know where Akhetaten was, a city destroyed 1,000 years before their time and long expunged from Egyptian memory, they had detailed knowledge of its layout.

  The form of burial – naked and without any worldly accoutrements – practised by the Qumran-Essenes is quite consistent with the simple style introduced by Akhenaten, who swept away all the accompanying ‘furniture for the afterlife’ and burial cults associated with tombs prior and subsequent to his reign. Akhenaten, like the Qumran-Essenes, did not believe in a physical resurrection of the body, but in a spiritual re-emergence in the next world: the Qumran-Essenes believed that they would be received into the ‘company of angels’ after death.27

  The Essenean asceticism associated with burial was in sharp contrast to the general behaviour and attitude of the Jewish populace in Judaea and elsewhere, which had ‘slipped back’ into a cult-type reverence for the dead. For them it was a sojourn in the darkness of the underworld, and it became customary to provide:

  food for the journey

  sprinkled water on the grave to provide refreshment

  weapons for men, and ornaments for women to help them in the after-life

  tombstones with names

  protective amulets.

  None of these practices or beliefs were held to by the Qumran-Essenes. All of them, however, can be identified with pre- or post-Akhenaten Egyptian practice and belief.

  The Qumran-Essenes’ belief was in sharp contrast to the Pharisaic belief of bodily resurrection,28 a belief that prevailed amongst the general population after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and predominates in Orthodox Jewry to this day. (Interestingly, the Reform and other Progressive movements of Judaism have, over the last one hundred years, moved back towards the original doctrines of the Qumran-Essenes. They have progressively reduced their acceptance of bodily resurrection and now advocate belief in an o
ngoing spiritual soul after death.)

  What then of the Copper Scroll – the penultimate expected ‘fingerprint’ – and the treasures of the First Temple (or perhaps an even earlier Temple)? If there had been little advanced recognition that the Temple was in danger, the chances of hiding away all the sacred articles would have been reduced. Considering the timescale of advanced warning, from prophets like Jeremiah, there would appear to have been time for the ‘priestly guardians’ to have hidden some of the treasures of the Temple, and to have written down where they were hidden – perhaps to add these locations to a list of treasures they already knew about from another Temple – before the cataclysmic event that shattered Jewish history and brought the Southern Kingdom to an end.*37

  Many of the scrolls in the possession of the Qumran-Essenes were secretive documents, unknown to the outside world. Like their attitudes towards death and burial, many of the scrolls of the Qumran Community relate to beliefs and activities that were inconsistent with the normative Judaism of the time. These inconsistencies have not been explained satisfactorily, in fact very little attempt has been made to explain them at all. Tracing their underlying meaning back to the time of Akhenaten explains most of the anomalies, and the solution to the enigma of the Copper Scroll.

  The search for these answers, in the engraved letters of a treasure map, encrypted in the form of a Copper Scroll, is about to enter its final exciting stage.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE LOST TREASURES OF AKHENATEN

  Prepare for the exciting climax of an extraordinary treasure hunt – a denouement that will irrefutably underscore the contention that the Qumran-Essenes were the direct executors of Akhenaten, with all that that implies about the undoubted influence they had on Christianity and Islam.

  In John Allegro’s original analysis of the Copper Scroll, he identified four likely locations for the lost treasures listed by the Qumran-Essenes. Namely, in the vicinities of: