Not whodunit but whoisit? The mystery deepens. I mean the mystery of the cemetery at Qumran with its 1,200 graves. Who was buried there? The conventional wisdom is that it was the Essenes. The reasoning goes like this: Sectarian manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like they were written around the turn of the era by the obscure Jewish sect known as the Essenes. The settlement at Qumran is close to the caves where the scrolls were found; indeed, the cave with the largest number of texts (Cave 4, which contained more than 500) is practically part of the settlement. Given the proximity of the settlement to the caves, the apparently Essene character of the sectarian scrolls, and the puzzling architecture of the settlement, Qumran must have been a kind of communal religious outpost of the Essenes. And since the cemetery is just outside the wall of the Essene settlement, the people buried in the cemetery must be Essene. Q.E.D.
The Qumran graves are markedly different from contemporaneous Jewish graves in Jerusalem. As discussed in Amos Kloner’s article in this issue (“Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus’ Tomb?”), those burials are mostly in caves. The Qumran burials, however, are shaft tombs. That is, a shaft with a 7-by-2-foot opening was dug about 5 to 7 feet deep. The body was laid on a shelf 051dug out at the bottom of the shaft. Then some slabs closed off the shelf, separating it from the shaft. Finally, the shaft was filled in and a cairn of stones laid on top.1
Recently about 50 similar shaft tombs were found at Beit Safafa in southwestern Jerusalem, so the reasoning was extended: These Jerusalem tombs were probably the tombs of Essenes living in the city.a
Now things are becoming more complicated. A cemetery with similar shaft tombs has been discovered at a site called Khirbet Qazone in Jordan, at the eastern end of the Lisan peninsula, which sticks into the Dead Sea. But this cemetery has been identified as Nabatean.b
One tends to think of the Qumran cemetery as enormous. In all of ancient Jerusalem, which is nearly surrounded by graves, only about 800 tombs have been found. Yet here in what must be one of the most inhospitable landscapes on earth, we find the Qumran cemetery with 1,200 graves. In short, in an urban setting like Jerusalem, much, much less has survived.
But even if the Qumran cemetery seems large, it is small compared to the Qazone cemetery. That cemetery consists of more than 3,500 graves!
And the similarity to the shaft tombs at Qumran is startling. The Qazone tombs are even more like the Qumran graves than the Beit Safafa shaft tombs are.
The Qumran tombs are oriented north-south. Half of the Beit Safafa tombs are oriented north-south and half east-west. But the Qazone tombs are all oriented north-south, just like the Qumran tombs.
British Museum archaeologist Konstantinos Politis has excavated 22 of the Qazone tombs:2 Each grave contained a single body, as did almost all the excavated tombs at Qumran. The shelves for the corpse at the base of the shaft were sealed by mudbrick slabs. The bodies in the Qazone cemetery were laid on their backs, just as at Qumran. Moreover, in both cemeteries the heads were all pointed toward the south. Thus the orientation of the graves and the bodies is the same at both sites, as is the style of the tomb. What, if any, is the cultural or ethnic connection between the Qumran cemetery and the Qazone cemetery?
Politis identifies Qazone as a Nabatean cemetery because it is roughly in Nabatea and because he found Nabatean potsherds in the shafts. However, no whole vessels were found buried with the bodies. Can potsherds from the shaft identify the ethnicity of the people buried in the shelf at the bottom? Some archaeologists have expressed doubts. But Politis found more: Four stelae in the cemetery depict Dushara, the principal god of the Nabateans (later hellenized as Dionysius). The depictions consist of rectangles and triangular pyramid designs well known in Nabatean iconography. Moreover, Nabatean names appear on three Greek papyri sold by Qazone tomb robbers and now in the collection of Shlomo Moussaieff of London.
One difference between the two cemeteries: At Qazone, men, women and children were buried. The Qumran burials were almost all male; the few women and children among the approximately 50 excavated graves were found not in the main cemetery but in small peripheral cemeteries. Some archaeologists, however, question whether the excavators of the graves at Qumran, working half a century ago, accurately distinguished between male and female skeletons.
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Because of the dry conditions of the soil at Qazone, the bodies were found in an extraordinary state of preservation. Not only the hair but even the skin and soft internal organs have survived for 2,000 years.
Some of the Qazone bodies were buried in leather shrouds made from several animal skins stitched together, decorated with diagonal and horizontal lines forming rectangles and sometimes painted red. Forty-two pieces of textile shrouds were also found. Some burial tunics, mantles and scarves remained in intact condition, although most of the cloth appears to have been well worn and frequently repaired before it was used in the burial. Perhaps the deceased were buried in their own clothes. Some of the sleeveless tunics have a purple stripe running down either side of the neck opening. A large red shawl is fringed. Some of the mantles (himation in Greek and pallium in Latin) are decorated with signs resembling the Greek letter gamma.
Unfortunately, as at Qumran, the Qazone tombs contained few grave goods: Some iron bracelets, copper and silver collars, silver and gold earrings and bracelets, beads, a scarab, a wooden staff, leather sandals and a laurel wreath were found, but no whole pottery vessels.
Politis says his survey of the area indicates that similar cemeteries may be located nearby (at Khirbet Sekine, al-Haditha, Feifa and Deir ’Ain ’Abata).
What are we to make of the similarity between the cemetery at Qumran and the cemetery at Qazone? Were both cemeteries Essene? Could they both have been Nabatean? Or was this simply the style of tombs in this area, regardless of the ethnicity of the buried population?
Texts from the so-called Babatha archive, dating from the end of the first century to the early second century C.E., indicate that Jews and Nabateans lived peacefully together in this area. Babatha was a prosperous Jewish widow who fled to a cave with her family’s precious legal documents in the hope of preserving them during the horrors of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (132–135 C.E.). What happened to Babatha we don’t know, except that she never returned to retrieve the documents.3 They were found by Israeli archaeologists in 1962 in a cave near the western shore of the Dead Sea. Babatha lived in the village of Maoza just south of the Dead Sea, a few miles from Qazone, in the Roman province of Arabia, whose capital was the Nabatean city of Petra. Although Babatha herself was Jewish, 6 of the 35 documents in her archive are written in Nabatean. One of the legal guardians of her young son has a Nabatean name. (Babatha sued him in the Roman court of Petra for not taking better care of her son.) What can we conclude from the obviously close commercial, and even familial, relationships between Jews and Nabateans at this time in the desolate landscape bordering the Dead Sea? Would it be surprising if both Jews and Nabateans buried their dead in this area in the same way, in shaft tombs oriented north-south, on their backs with their heads to the south?
Clearly, we cannot attribute the similarity between the Qumran and the Qazone burials simply to the geology of the region, since similar shaft tombs have been found at Beit Safafa in Jerusalem. Moreover, there are plenty of caves in the Dead Sea area where the inhabitants could have buried their dead if this were the preferred burial custom.
As usual when we don’t have the answers, we turn to our readers. Maybe you can help solve the mystery.
Not whodunit but whoisit? The mystery deepens. I mean the mystery of the cemetery at Qumran with its 1,200 graves. Who was buried there? The conventional wisdom is that it was the Essenes. The reasoning goes like this: Sectarian manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls sound like they were written around the turn of the era by the obscure Jewish sect known as the Essenes. The settlement at Qumran is close to the caves where the scrolls were found; indeed, the cave with the largest number of texts (Cave 4, which contained more than 500) is practically part of […]
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A nomadic people of Arab descent, the Nabateans first settled the area south and east of the Dead Sea in about the sixth century B.C.E. The Nabateans eventually built cities throughout the desert, including their capital Petra.
Endnotes
1.
Similar tombs have also been found at Ein el-Ghuweir, 17 of which have been excavated. These held the remains of 13 men and 6 women. See Pesach Bar Adon, “Another Settlement of the Judean Desert Sect at ‘Ein el-Ghuweir on the Shores of the Dead Sea,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 225 (1977), p. 2. At Hiam El-Sagha, in the Judean Desert, some 20 shaft tombs were surveyed, 2 of which were excavated. See Hanan Eshel and Zvi Greenhut, “Hiam El-Sagha: A Cemetery of the Qumran Type, Judean Desert,” Revue biblique 100–102 (1993), p. 252.
2.
Konstantinos D. Politis, “Excavations at the Nabataean Cemetery at Khirbat Qazone, 1996–1997,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 42 (1998), p. 611.
