Word: parchments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began badly for the team of American biblical scholars who had been granted a rare opportunity to examine and photograph a precious manuscript in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book. Hunched over a swath of darkened and decomposing parchment with a powerful magnifying glass, they were barely able to discern a single letter. But that night, as they reviewed photo negatives still wet from the developing tank, their luck changed dramatically. Passages that had been invisible to the naked eye jumped out at them from the film. "It was a moment of exploding consciousness," recalls James Charlesworth, professor...
Charlesworth's enthusiastic reaction is understandable, for the text he was examining was not just any scrap of parchment. It was the legendary Genesis Apocryphon, one of the original seven rolls of inscribed sheepskin known as the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and the only one whose contents are still largely unread. Unearthed in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds from rocky caves only 15 miles from Jerusalem, the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered by biblical archaeologists to be the greatest manuscript discovery ever made. Their texts, set down in Hebrew and Aramaic some 2,000 years ago, include long-lost originals of dozens...
...version of the book of Genesis had deteriorated so badly that scholars despaired of ever uncovering its ancient secrets. That is, until the American team that included Charlesworth arrived in Jerusalem earlier this year. Armed with about 300 pounds of photographic equipment, the team hoped to analyze the aged parchment with sophisticated image-enhancement techniques developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study the surfaces of distant planets. First they planned to photograph the scrolls using infrared and conventional film. Then they would use a computer to magnify and clarify the images. By these means they hoped...
...fragments we saw looked like someone had poured coffee all over them," recalls Charlesworth. "The leather had turned a kind of liquid, a black goo." Even the best-preserved swaths of text were peppered with tiny holes where acids in the ink had eaten all the way through the parchment. Says another member of the team, Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California: "Time has not been kind to the scroll. Like the Titanic, it is sinking...
...first awful glance, Edwin Flath looks to have been consumed by AIDS. Flath, founder and musical director of the California Bach Society Choral Group, is 57 but looks 87. His body, swathed in blankets, shakes with each terrible cough. But his parchment eyelids flutter open at the thought of his music. "I'm learning a new repertoire," he says when the coughing subsides. "Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms sonatas. Life and art are inseparable -- you love it and you give it away." He rises from bed and slowly walks to his piano, sits and begins a short piece by Leos Janacek...