THE MILWAUKEE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION is coming on 22 January and preparations are well underway:

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit coming alive

By Jackie Loohauis-Bennett of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Dec. 12, 2009

If you let loose your imagination, you might hear a desert wind blowing across Milwaukee and smell the scent of ancient parchments - and maybe just a whiff of old camel.

That's because curators and artists are re-creating part of the Middle East in the halls of the Milwaukee Public Museum for the "Dead Sea Scrolls and The Bible," the largest temporary exhibit ever produced by the museum staff.

Opening Jan. 22, the exhibit will evoke a faraway time and place using everything from eerie wind sound effects to a 50-foot-wide re-creation of Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

The "Dead Sea Scrolls" spotlights more than 200 artifacts dating from 300 B.C. to A.D. 70, including the oldest known texts of the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) and the oldest existing version of the Hebrew Masoretic Text.

[...]

Then there's this:

But perhaps no job on this construction site has been more delicate than the one Wendy Christensen-Senk has tackled for three months. She's rebuilding a camel. A camel with dry rot.

In life, the camel with no name trod the sands of the Middle East. In the 1970s, his skin was mounted at the museum, and he has held court in the North Africa Exhibit since then.

When "Dead Sea Scrolls" planners decided to use him to portray the lifestyle of the Bedouin people who found the scrolls, Christensen-Senk took a close look to see how the camel had fared over the decades.

The diagnosis: A severe case of camel rot.

"The acids from the tanning process had eaten up the skin, and he had dry rot," she said. "Pieces of him were flaking off."

Christensen-Senk had to use a hypodermic needle to put the skin back using new types of glue that flex with the temperature. She added parts of the skin that had gone missing over the years.

These days, Camel stands proud again: hump up, lips saucy. Christensen-Senk said: "No straw could break this camel's back. He's back in his glory."

A camel through the eye of a needle?

I've noted this exhibition earlier here.