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Old 11-23-2017, 01:28 PM   #33
Textcritic
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Originally Posted by Wormius View Post
This is pretty interesting. What was the tolerance on the C14 dating? Would texts having to do with the same content all be pretty consistent with the media they were written on? And where are people finding these bits of ancient media to forge with? Were there blank portions of the DSS that were used?
I don't know a lot about carbon dating since I am not a scientist, and for this reason I am working with actual physicists in my present project, and I am not sure I understand your second question.

As to where the media comes form, and whether there are blank portions of DSS used for these fragments, this raises some interesting points in my research. Early on when I started working with Schøyen's fragments a common argument for the authenticity of some of them was that it would be so difficult to acquire large enough portions of uninscribed pieces from antiquity for just anyone. It seemed like a reasonable circumstantial argument, but with time I started to see some problems in it.

First, some history of the original discovery is necessary for establishing some context...

The DSS were primarily excavated by Bedouin shepherds between 1947 and 1953, and then sold through a middleman to the archaeologists at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. At first, they were paying set prices per individual fragment, but then quickly realized that the Bedouin were tearing fragments into smaller pieces in order to secure a higher return. They then decided to set a new price on the basis of each square centimetre of inscribed surface. Because of the sheer volume of material, there was little interest for a very long time in blank portions of manuscript fragments, and the Bedouin probably did not even bring many of these to their vendor in the first place, since they were not worth anything in the sale to the archaeologists. One of the archaeologists spoke about forming his own collection of "blanks" in an effort to eventually use them in a study of scribal practices, but the study never materialized before his death, and these uninscribed fragments in his possession have been lost.

Interests among scholars in scribal practices have increased substantially in recent decades, but we are now handicapped by the way this history has unfolded: many of what I would now consider to be highly interesting, uninscribed scroll fragments have been lost. And since in the early days of discovery there was little interest in anything other than inscribed fragments, also missing from this time are colour photographs of almost all the fragments (since most can only be read in the infrared spectrum), as well as photographs of the uninscribed verso side.

So, all that is to say that yes, I believe there are lots of uninscribed fragments from actual manuscripts circulating among private collectors, or squirrelled away somewhere in the Israel Antiquities Authority's holdings. I suspect that some of these might have been used for creating the forgeries I have seen.

But this does not account for most or even all of them. As mentioned earlier, many of the forgeries are physically quite dissimilar from fragments of actual parchment manuscripts in antiquity. My colleague, physicist Ira Rabin, has argued that many of the fragments cannot be identified as prepared parchments, and are technically more accurately described as "leather." Some of these bear the appearance of scraps from old shoes or wineskins, and I also suspect that bits of variously manufactured pieces of leather produced in antiquity have also been used to make fake DSS fragments. Interestingly enough, Schøyen actually has in his collection some leather remains of ancient sandals, and one of these actually appears very similar to another of his DSS fragments which we have physically tested and analyzed and shown to be a forgery.
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"The Lying Pen of Scribes" Ancient Manuscript Forgeries Project

Last edited by Textcritic; 11-23-2017 at 01:47 PM.
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