044
The Copper Scroll is one piece that doesn’t fit the Dead Sea Scroll puzzle. Inscribed on metal and consisting simply of a list of 64 locations where huge amounts of treasure are said to be buried, the Copper Scroll has divided scholarly opinion for decades: Is it a list of something real or is it merely some fantasy, to be taken no more seriously than a child’s map of buried pirate treasure?
Most of the scholars who first studied the scroll in the 1950s were not taken in by its fantastical aspects. J. T. Milik, the scholar entrusted with publishing the scroll, compared it to documents from Jewish folklore that claimed to describe treasure and sacred vessels from the First Temple hidden before they could be looted by the conquering Babylonians in 587 B.C. In Milik’s view the Copper Scroll was equally folkloric—only it had to do with the Second Temple, not the first. Indeed, the research team entrusted with publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls first described the Copper Scroll in a press release as merely “a collection of traditions about buried treasure.”1
The principal basis for this conclusion is the impossibly large amounts of the supposedly buried caches of gold and silver.
In more recent years, scholarship has drifted in the other direction, until today, it is fair to say, there is a developing consensus that the Copper Scroll is fact, not fiction, and describes actual hiding places—or at least that is what the author intended to describe.
Why this change in scholarly opinion? The answer lies in the nature of the Copper Scroll itself and in what it contains.
Unlike the other Dead Sea Scrolls, it is inscribed on copper, rather than on leather or papyrus—an indication that it was very important and meant to outlast the ravages of time. But its greatest departure from the other scrolls is its content: an unembellished, laundry-list record of 64 locations where treasures are supposedly hidden.
The current consensus that the Copper Scroll describes something real rests, in sum, on what Geza Vermes calls
“two of the document’s most striking characteristics, namely the dry realism of its style, very different from that of ancient legends, and the fact that it is recorded on copper instead of on the less expensive leather or papyrus. For if it is, in fact, a sort of fairy-story, the present text can only represent the outline of such a tale, and who in their senses would have engraved their literary notes on valuable metal?”2
The remaining fly in the ointment, however, is the impossibly large—or supposedly impossibly large—amounts of the buried treasure. Milik estimated that the scroll listed approximately 4,630 talents of gold and silver.3 The size of a talent from the Copper Scroll’s time is a matter of debate, with estimates ranging from 25 to 75 pounds. Thus the scroll’s treasure could total anywhere from 58 to 174 tons of precious metal.
Is this amount simply too large to be realistic? Fortunately, ancient literature and ancient inscriptions contain many references to amounts of treasure. Some refer to what has been seized by a conqueror. Others provide a record of the contents of a communal treasury. Still others refer to tribute imposed on conquered nations. When the amounts recorded in these references are compared to the amounts listed in the Copper Scroll, the latter no longer seem impossibly large.
045
Before we move on to review these ancient references, however, we must first refine our estimate of the total hoard listed in the Copper Scroll. For our purposes, Milik’s estimate of 4,630 talents, or between 58 and 174 tons, is not particularly useful because it is a combined figure for both gold and silver. We will use instead the more specific estimate given by Geza Vermes, himself a distinguished scroll scholar, whose calculations for the Copper Scroll hoards come to about 65 tons of silver and 26 tons of gold.4
We can go one step further: Gold in ancient times was typically exchanged for 13 times its weight in silver.5 Divide the Copper Scroll figure for silver by 13 and you get the equivalent of 5 tons of gold; add to that the 26 tons of actual gold, and the total for the Copper Scroll hoards—expressed in terms of gold—comes to 31 tons.
This is an immense sum, to be sure; but let’s begin our comparisons by consulting the chart. The chart lists ancient wealth in Persia, Greece and Rome, both communal and the treasures of individual rulers. Some of the wealth on the chart was acquired through taxation, some through conquest; in terms of time, the wealth we will consider dates from the fifth century B.C. to the second century A.D.
One thing is certain about the Copper Scroll: The treasure it lists is so large that, if real, it must have been connected with the Temple at Jerusalem. King Herod, it is true, might have had such a sum. He is said to have left Augustus Caesar and his friends the equivalent of 3.3 tons of gold. But by the time that the Copper Scroll is thought to have been written, Herod was no longer alive. In any case, he would have had no reason to bury so much of his wealth.
Looking further afield, our earliest figures for ancient wealth are those Herodotus gives for the annual income of the Persian kings—the equivalent of about 39 tons of gold. That income is, in fact, almost identical to the total value of the Copper Scroll hoard.
In his history of Persia, Professor Arthur Olmstead of the Oriental Institute in Chicago estimates the treasure that Alexander the Great found at Persepolis and Susa, in Persia, to have been the equivalent of about 836 tons of gold—vastly more than the Copper Scroll total.
Moving from Persia to ancient Greece, there is a dispute about the phoros (contributions) that Athens received from her allies, with the estimates ranging from .86 to 1.3 tons of gold. For ancient Rome, Tenney Frank, the editor of The Economic Survey of Ancient Rome and author of two of its five volumes, estimates the income of the Roman state in 80 B.C. to have been 13 tons of gold; by 14 A.D. it was 37 tons.
At its high point, in 432 B.C., Athens’ treasury contained 21 tons of gold. The first-century Greek historian Diodorus Siculus records that in 347 B.C. the treasury at Delphi contained the equivalent of 127 tons of gold. If this figure is accurate, the temple at Delphi was far richer than the Temple at Jerusalem.
Our survey has shown that the sums listed in the Copper Scroll are not beyond the realm of reason. They are, to be sure, very, very large, but the Jerusalem Temple was not a private enterprise—it was a taxing body. We can no longer consign the Copper Scroll to the category of fantasy literature on the grounds that the figures it contains are too large to believe.
The Copper Scroll is one piece that doesn’t fit the Dead Sea Scroll puzzle. Inscribed on metal and consisting simply of a list of 64 locations where huge amounts of treasure are said to be buried, the Copper Scroll has divided scholarly opinion for decades: Is it a list of something real or is it merely some fantasy, to be taken no more seriously than a child’s map of buried pirate treasure? Most of the scholars who first studied the scroll in the 1950s were not taken in by its fantastical aspects. J. T. Milik, the scholar entrusted with […]
