MERCURY IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

Poisonous ink killed Monks?

(ZeeNews.com)

Washington, June 28: Monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials might have died out of exposure to toxic mercury, with which the red colour ink they used for scripting was made, according to a study.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, believes that the ink might have been the culprit.

He came to this conclusion after studying medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries.

The researcher says that his study also describes a previously undocumented disease called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions.

[...]

Lund Rasmussen says that mercury "was used (in the ink) in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful colour."

A separate study by Israeli scientists recently found cinnabar on four fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include passages from the Hebrew Bible.

"(Even today) one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum," Discovery News quoted Lund Rasmussen as warning.

[...]

The study will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Ugh. I myself have not worked with any of the Scrolls that use red ink. But, as far as I know, no Qumranologists have developed skull lesions or leprosy symptoms.