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Hyrcania’s Mysterious Tunnels

Searching for the Treasures of the Copper Scroll

By Oren Gutfeld

I was hardly in a position to say no. After all, in 1999 I was a mere graduate student. So when Professor Amihai Mazar, the head of the department of archaeology at the Hebrew University, asked me if I would talk to an American who wanted someone to undertake an excavation, I, of course, said I would be happy to see him. At the time, I was busy in one of the laboratories of the Institute of Archaeology studying a hoard of bronze artifacts that I had recently discovered in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. Into the […]

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Endnotes

1.

The Times (London), June 1, 1956, p. 12.

2.

Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 19 (1956), p. 532.

3.

“The Mystery of the Copper Scroll” in Hershel Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 237.

4.

See G.H.R. Wright, “The Archaeological Remains at el Mird in the Wilderness of Judea,” Biblica, vol. 42 (1961), pp. 43–46.

5.

Allegro found one of the tunnels cleared to about 100 feet (the one we excavated); only the first couple steps of the other tunnel had been cleared. See John Marco Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), p. 60.

6.

Judith Anne Brown, John Marco Allegro, The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 125.

7.

Identified by Dr. Dixie West of Kansas State University.

8.

Antiquities of the Jews, XV.366 (Loeb ed.).