The longest sport salt finish Dead Sea Scroll missing from others

Decades after death
Sea Scrolls have been discovered in desert caves, ancient manuscripts still offer
surprises.

Chemical analysis of
the Scroll Temple, the longest of the scrolls, has revealed a salty
coating on the text side of the parchment that was not found before
others. This unusual finish suggests that the Scroll Temple is remarkably bright.
the parchment was made differently from other documents in the collection,
The researchers report online on September 6 in Science
Advances.

We do not know yet how
the mineral coating may have contributed to the striking impact of
appearance, says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at MIT. But understand
the properties of this manuscript and others as this could illuminate the strategies of
the preservation of these 2000-year-old documents, which include sections of the Hebrew
Bible, as well as help to spot the fake ones.

Masic and his colleagues scrutinized
a small fragment of the Scroll Temple using X-ray and Raman spectroscopy. These
the techniques involve shining radiation on a sample and measuring the light that emanates
come back to map the chemical composition of the material.

"This surprise has come
salts we did not expect to find at all, "says Masic. the
mixture at the top of the Scroll Temple includes mainly sulphate salts, including
minerals such as gypsum, glauberite and thenardite, never seen before dead woman
Sea rolls (SN: 17/11/17). "Sometimes
you find a lot of inorganic components on these rolls or fragments, and they
probably came from the caves, "says Masic. But since the minerals on the temple
We do not usually find parchment in the Dead Sea area, it's more
likely that these materials were used in the production of the roll,
the researchers conclude.

This salt finish
This technique may not have been unique to the Scroll Temple. In a further analysis of
Fragments of the Dead Sea manuscript from another cave, the team found traces of
salts on another piece of manuscript. The next step is to identify where such minerals
occur naturally, to determine whether the materials used to make the rolls were
imported from outside the region, says Masic.