Word: bedouin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Much of the Scrolls' nine-year history is marked by uncertainty: first, in the incredible scramble by the Bedouin to find them; later, in determining their ultimate ownership; and still later, in assuring their authenticity. How much of the vast Essene library was lost by idle tribesmen, who neither understood nor cared for the Scrolls' significance, is unknown. Scholars hope that most of the scraps have been collected. Many pieces were returned when the Jordan Government's Department of Antiquities boosted its rate per square centimeter. Legally, all the Scrolls became the Department's property on discovery; it could later...
Meanwhile, a vast, disorganized combing of the Qumran area was conducted by the Bedouin, inspired with the scholars' enthusiastic appraisal of their first fund. The original Cave One was not relocated until 1949, when the Arab Legion undertook the search. Gradually the discoveries were investigated by trained archeologists. Lankester Harding, of the Department of Antiquities, and Pere de Vaux, of the French School of Archeology in Jerusalem, jointly assumed control. In Cave One alone, they found 600 scroll fragments...
Less than a year later, in September 1952, the Bedouin located still another cave. Tribesmen tried to carry off much of the new discovery, but the authorities arrived, fortunately, before the find of "Cave Four" had been completely dispersed. McGill, Manchester, Bonn and Heidelberg universities, along with the Vatican Library, assisted financially in recovering pieces divided among the natives. Six more small deposits, in Caves Five through Ten, were discovered between...
...elbow-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire and handed it to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said, for the Emir's fighting services to Britain in the desert campaigns against the Turks. Abdullah ruled his arid waste spaces as a Bedouin black-tent state, with three courtiers alternating as Premier at the royal pleasure, and a British proconsul in the Lawrence-of-Arabia tradition commanding the British-equipped Arab Legion. Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb Pasha-known affectionately by his Bedouin warriors as Abu Huneik (Father of the Little...
Partly because it had been thought that such manuscripts could not survive that long, a controversy soon arose about their authenticity. "The Bedouin story smells," huffed a professor of rabbinical literature. Others insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries. One scholar, disputing the manuscripts' antiquity, contemptuously referred to them as a "garbage collection." But the antiquity of the scrolls was soon proved conclusively by paleographical and archaeological evidence and by carbon-14 and other tests...