Column 05
A water conduit is located on the northern side of Sekaka. Dig down three cubits under the large stone at the head of this water conduit to discover seven talents of silver. Vessels of offering can be found in the fissure of Sekaka, which is on the eastern side of the reservoir of Solomon. Twenty-three talents of silver are buried quite nearby above Solomon’s Canal. To locate the exact spot, go sixty cubits toward the great stone, and dig down for three cubits. Thirty-two talents of silver can be located by digging seven cubits under the tomb in the dried up riverbed of Kepah, which is between Jericho and Sekaka.
Column 06
Forty-two talents of silver lie underneath a scroll in an urn. To locate the urn, dig down three cubits into the northern opening of the cave of the pillar that has two entrances and faces east. Twenty-one talents of silver can be found by digging nine cubits beneath the entrance of the eastward-looking cave at the base of the large stone. Twentyseven talents of silver can be found by digging twelve cubits into the western side of the Queen’s Mausoleum. Dig nine cubits into the burial mound of stones located at the Ford of the High Priest to find twenty-two talents of silver.
Column 07
To find four hundred talents of silver measure out twenty-four cubits from the water conduit of Q[this bit’s damaged] of the northern reservoir with four sides. Dig six cubits into the cave that is nearby Bet Ha-Qos to locate six bars of silver. Dig seven cubits down under the eastern corner of the citadel of Doq to find twenty-two talents of silver. Dig three cubits by the row of stones at the mouth of the Kozibah river to obtain sixty talents of silver, and two talents of gold.
Column 08
A bar of silver, ten vessels of offering, and ten books are in the aqueduct on the road that is to the east of Bet Ahsor, which is east of Ahzor. Dig down seventeen cubits beneath the stone that lies in the middle of the sheep pen located in the outer valley to find seventeen talents of silver and gold. Dig three cubits under the burial mound of stones located at the mouth of the Potter ravine to find four talents of silver. Dig twentyfour cubits below the northward burial chamber that is located on the south-west side of the fallow field of the valley of ha-Shov to reveal sixty-six talents. Dig eleven cubits at the landmark in the irrigated land of ha-Shov and you will find seventy talents of silver.
Column 09
Measure out thirteen cubits from the small opening at the edge of Nataf, and then dig down seven cubits there. Seven talents of silver and four stater coins lie there. Dig down eight cubits into the easternlooking cellar of the second estate of Chasa to obtain twenty-three and a half talents of silver. Dig sixteen cubits into the narrow, seawardfacing part of the underground chambers of Horon to discover twentytwo talents of silver. A sacred offering worth one mina of silver is located at the pass. Dig down seven cubits at the edge of the conduit on the eastern side inside the waterfall to locate nine talents of silver.
Column 10
When going down to the second floor, look to the small opening to find nine talents of silver coins. Twelve talents lie at the foot of the water wheel of the dried up irrigation ditches which would be fed by the great canal. Sixty-two talents of silver can be found by going to the left for ten paces at the reservoir which is in Beth Hakerem. Three-hundred talents of gold and twenty penalty fees can be found at the entrance to the pond of the valley Zok. The entrance is on the western side by the black stone that is held in place by two supports. Eight talents of silver can be found by digging under the western side of Absalom’s Memorial. Seventeen talents are located beneath the water outlet in the base of the latrines. Gold and vessels of offering are in this pool at its four angles.
Column 11
Very near there, under the southern corner of the portico in Zadok’s tomb, beneath the pillars of the covered hall are ten vessels of offering of pine resin, and an offering of senna. Gold coins and consecrated offerings are located under the great closing stone that is by the edge, next to the pillars that are near by the throne, and toward the tip of the rock to the west of the garden of Zadok. Forty talents of silver are buried in the grave that is under the colonnades. Fourteen votive vessels possibly of pine and resin are in the tomb of the common people and Jericho. Vessels of offering of aloes and tithe of white pine are located at Beth Esdatain, in the reservoir at the entrance of the small pool. Over nine-hundred talents of silver are next to the reservoir at the brook that runs near the western entrance of the sepulchre room.
Column 12
Five talents of gold and sixty more talent are under the black stone at the Western entrance. Forty-two talents of silver coin are in the proximity of the black stone at the threshold at the sepulchral chamber. Sixty talents of silver and vessels are in a chest that is under the stairs of the upper tunnel on Mount Garizim. Six-hundred talents of silver and gold lie in the spring of Beth-Sham. Treasure weighing seventy-one talents and twenty minas are in the big underground pipe of the burial chamber at the point where it joins the house of the burial chamber. A copy of this inventory list, its explanation and the measurements and details of every hidden item are in the dry underground cavity that is in the smooth rock north of Kohlit. Its opening is towards the north with the tombs at its mouth.
So, for over 70 years, people have been scouring the Israeli and Jordanian desert for these treasures.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
The leading figure of exploratory searching for the treasure was John Allegro, who had been involved in getting the thing unrolled and translated in the first place. Long story short, the copper had oxidized, and could not be simply unrolled, as it would disintegrate if attempted. Ideas for opening it included reducing the copper with hydrogen – which would have disintegrated it – or using electrolysis to restore the copper back to a pre-oxidization state, which would defy all the laws of physics and metallurgy.
John Allegro, however, decided to try having it gently cut apart and reassembled flat. At first he wanted this to be done at Manchester University, who refused to take the risk, so he turned to Manchester’s College of Technology, where Professor H. Wright Baker had the idea of coating the scroll with transparent epoxy to hold it together, before cutting it away one millimetre at a time. In the end, it was cut into 23 strips, which could then be reassembled and read.
Allegro wanted to hold a press conference and announce the finding of the translation being a treasure guide. This didn’t go down too well with the French scholar in charge, Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem. With the scrolls being important religious artefacts, a team of clergymen had been assembled to take charge. De Vaux assigned Father Joseph T. Milik to edit the text for publication. They told him to keep quiet, partly to hold off amateur fortune hunters, but mainly because Milik and de Vaux didn’t believe a word of the scroll. They thought the amounts mentioned were just too outrageous – with things like 65 tons of silver in one place, and 25 tons of gold in another – to be possibly true. (These amounts were more than anyone believed had existed in one place in the 1st century.)
De Vaux and Milik thought that the scroll being in a different medium from the others was a sign that its content was just a legend, while Allegro thought it proved the story, because why else use such a fancy medium? Allegro also felt that after all his work he was being side-lined by Vaux and Milik. And he might have been right, because they stopped responding to his translation and letters. They refused to let him publish anything about it. They banned him from the lab and lectures and threatened him with loss of tenure.
In 1959, Milik published the Hebrew text of the scroll, with a commentary which essentially said it was a fake, at least in the sense of being a lie on the part of its 1st-century creators. Allegro then published his unofficial translation in 1960, which was hugely popular, because it said there was plenty of treasure out there to find. The French published Milik’s translation in 1962.
Allegro, however, wasn’t just a translator. He decided to
prove the truth of the scroll by finding some of the treasure himself. First, however, he needed some financial backers – But the École Biblique, Manchester University and Jordanian University had all been put off him. So the Daily Mail put up the money and sent a reporter along. King Hussein of Jordan decided to join in with funding and army support – after all, anything found would belong to him.
Allegro first went to Khirbet Mird, site of the Judean fortress of Hyrcania, on the West Bank of the Jordan, about 4 miles from Qumran. He believed the fortress belonged to Herod and fit the first location in the scroll. And he found the narrow stairs, going 300ft down, and a vault at the bottom – but it had been trashed in the past. Marble columns knocked down, mosaic floors hacked up. Needless to say there was no treasure remaining. Allegro’s camp was then hit by a sandstorm and destroyed.
Next, he looked at Khirbet Qumran itself, linking it with a location referred to in the scroll as Sakata. A small hoard of silver shekels – three pottery jugs full – had been found there years earlier, before the scroll was found, so this suggested that it might be a location. Metal detectors were used now, but they were triggered by natural magnetic ore, and journalists were crowding the site every day. Allegro did find a cave concealed in a cliff face, with bones and pottery dating to 400 BC – but this predated the Essenes and there was no treasure.
So he went to Jerusalem and found what was referred to as the Tomb of Zadok – which was empty. Finally, he went to the Temple Mount itself. There’s a honeycomb of tunnels under there, and some two dozen of the scroll’s locations are around the Temple Mount – but no permission was given to dig there. Even King Hussein wouldn’t put any pressure on the Israeli authorities to let him mess with the Dome of the Rock.
A different Bedouin had found other caves on the opposite side of the valley from Qumran, accessible only by mountain goat or helicopter, and this was another location Allegro wanted to match up with the treasure list. Allegro raised enough funds to explore this second set of locations: Christmas cave, Mazin (a 1stcentury Jewish rebel base) and Ein Feshkha.
King Hussein of Jordan lent support again and came to visit the camp on Christmas day 1962, but all Allegro could show him were Roman coins and gear from AD 70. Christmas cave contained a long tunnel leading to lots of bats, Roman lamps, wool and jugs of Byzantine coins from around the 6th century, but none of the treasures listed in the scroll. Nor were any treasures found at Mazin or Ein Feshkha.
Allegro’s searches came to nothing, and the French team, who had done their best to get him out of the way, were sure that his translations were no more than a fairy tale. He died in 1988, almost alone in still believing the scroll was true and the treasure existed. But … in the 1990s and noughties his translations were independently confirmed as accurate. To this day, however, supporters of each side still cast aspersions upon the other as being unreliable.
Others think because the Essenes wrote the scroll at Qumran, they were describing bits of Qumran itself as hiding places. There is some logic to this, as some of the descriptions do fit – for example, Khirbet Qumran is technically within the valley of Achor, mentioned in the first column. Retired fire marshal and arson investigator turned private Copper Scroll researcher Jim Barfield applied the directions to Qumran, finding that the only stairs 40 cubits long did have an entrance at the east, as per a version of the first entry in the scroll. He also found points matching various other caches from the scroll, within the ruins of Qumran. However, ‘stairs heading east’ is not the same as ‘steps with the entrance at the east’, so there is still no real certainty. There may simply be a variation in idiom between translations, or it could simply be that the stairs at Qumran and the stairs listed in the scroll are not the same place. Either way, no treasure was found there.
Barfield’s theory is that having the ascetic Essenes guarding a lot of treasure was like having eunuchs guarding the vestal virgins: they’re the last people anyone would expect to have the loot, and since they had no interest in material wealth, they could be trusted to keep it safe and not spend it themselves. He also believes the treasure is from Old Testament times, belonged to Moses and came from the same Tabernacle that held the Ark of the Covenant.
Barfield came to believe that the various hiding spots he believes he has found at Qumran – even though none contained the treasures mentioned – line up to point to the last location on the list. In 2009 he persuaded the Israeli Antiquities Authority to allow a dig, which found nothing. Barfield thinks he simply hasn’t dug deep enough yet, and that $3 billion of gold and silver – plus gems – is buried in a squat pyramid-like building, which still exists at Qumran. As if that wasn’t enough, he also claims that this is where Jeremiah hid the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant, according to his interpretation of Second Maccabees (see the chapter on the Ark of the Covenant).
In 1964, a Texan Baptist minister (now retired), Vendyl Jones, got bitten by the scroll bug and began a life-long search for the treasure. He wasn’t immediately rewarded, but his persistence paid off in 1988, when his team found something of interest in a Qumran cave: an earthen vessel filled with what had originally been oil used in the temple to cover sacrifices – one of the libation vessels mentioned in Column 3 of the scroll.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Nobody is actually certain who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls in general, or whether the Copper Scroll was written with them or separately. Its script is a little different than those of the other scrolls, partly because it has been hammered into the metal with a die-punch, rather than written by hand. It was also not the work of one person – it’s in at least three or four hands – which means probably no single scribe knew the whole piece of any treasure location description given in it. This may also explain why there is no particular order to the inventory – locations seem to be jumbled up at random.
It’s also written in a later form of Hebrew than the Biblical sort that is more commonly seen by archaeologists. This language is more similar to the Mishnaic Hebrew in use in the 1st century AD. This has led some scholars to think it must have been written by a priest from the Temple of Herod (built in 20 BC), and also because it refers to vessels of a kind that would have been used by the priesthood. Herod’s Temple, also known as the Second Temple, was definitely big enough and flashy enough to have been the source of such a large treasure hoard.
The Romans trashed the temple around AD 70 after an uprising, so perhaps a priest wrote it as a memo to describe hiding the treasures of a temple to prevent losing its contents to the Romans. So the directions in it refer to stuff that only local priests at the time would have understood (e.g. direction to ‘look under the grave’ – only a local priest would have known which grave in which cemetery).
As for the locations in the inventory…
Nobody has identified Horebbah, and most scholars seem to think it’s either fictional or at least too vague a name to tell whether it was town, an area or a building. The same goes for Milham, was it a village, a region, a geographical feature, a building, or even a person? Nobody knows.
Achor, however, did exist, and is just into the desert northwest of the Dead Sea. There is a fortress built into a cliff there on Mount Hyrcania, called Khirbet el-Mird. This was used in the 1st century, and there is a set of steps that match the description – you can also see the valley where the scroll was found from there. The steps were discovered in the 1950s, but were filled in with dirt from 2,000 years of flash floods. In 2000, the Israeli Antiquities Authority allowed a dig to begin. Over four years, archaeologists excavated a narrow (only two people can squeeze in at a time – and that’s if they’re stick-thin) tunnel of steps down from an eastern entrance. At the bottom, 300ft down, the tunnel splits in two, leading to two … walls of bedrock.
It’s possible that it was used as a safe to stash loot, but if so, it has obviously been removed at some point in antiquity. Or maybe the vault was never finished.
Matia’s Courtyard is also a mystery, though a
number of scholars think that the reference to a cistern in it means it was at the First Wall of Jerusalem, as there is a big cistern under there. However, there are cisterns of one kind or another all over ancient Israel, so there’s no real evidence to identify this one with Matia’s Courtyard.
The Wadi Atsla is north-west of the Dead Sea, and is only about about 2km from the site of Qumran. Speaking of which, most researchers now agree with Allegro’s theory that the town listed in the scroll as Sekaka was in fact Qumran itself.
The Queen’s Mausoleum must have been in a pretty high-class area, which has led to the theory that it might be in the vicinity of Jericho, as the Hasmonean dynasty of kings and queens had built apartments and lived there some of the time, and so had also presumably built tombs. What’s more interesting is the reference to Beth Haqoz – there was a dynasty of priests near Jericho called Hakkoz (considering the varying translations this probably is the same name), who had been treasurers of the Second Temple. This also makes them possible candidates for having been involved in creating the scroll and hiding the treasure.
Dok is a real place, a couple of kilometres north of Jericho. Kozibah was also real, and part of the Wadi Qelt – specifically the stretch between Ein Qelt and Jericho. Wadi Qelt is a little valley north-west of the Dead Sea, in which the monastery of St George was built into caves in the cliff wall in the 5th century. The Copper Scroll mentions this place as having 70 talents of silver, and two of gold. There are hundreds of caves at Wadi Qelt, as well as a monastery built into the cliff. The monastery has been there for 1,500 years and there have been no reports of anyone finding the treasure.
A Nataf wasn’t a specific place, but a structure like a large birdhouse, with lots of holes for birds to come and go from. Either it must have been one at an unnamed place, or else somewhere had this as a nickname, probably because of looking like one.
Fortune and Glory Page 23
