Cincinnati DSS exhibit

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS are coming to Cincinnati, Ohio:

Dead Sea Scrolls will be here Friday
Fragile documents widely among the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century

4:43 AM, Nov 11, 2012 |

If you go to a show called Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times, you might expect to see, well, scrolls.

But instead, when this traveling exhibit opens Friday at Cincinnati Museum Center, you will witness relatively small parchment (in a rare case, papyrus) pieces that have been torn, frayed, smudged and otherwise affected in surviving the past 2,000+ years of history.

But don’t be dismissive. They are more precious than diamonds. They constitute the oldest writings known of the Hebrew Bible, and provide insight into the development of Judaism, Christianity and Western Civilization.

So fragile and valuable are they that there will just be two rotations of 10 each on display during the course of the exhibit, which lasts until at least April 14. (There are some 900 scrolls in existence.) These will be protected inside the drawer-like chambers of a circular, light- and climate-controlled Communal Scroll Table along with an English translation of the mostly Hebrew text.

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The exhibition includes many interesting fragments; there's a list at the end of the article. It is an incarnation of the exhibition that ran previously at Discovery Times Square and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphi.