ANNIVERSARY: On This Day: Israel reveals it has all the Dead Sea Scrolls after secretly buying them from Arabs (Julian Gavaghan, Yahoo News). Cool contemporary newsreel.
The article is a little confused toward the end: the Dead Sea Scrolls are the (roughly) 972 scrolls found in the eleven caves near Qumran and are widely believed to be a library left by a single sectarian Jewish group that was probably related in some way to the Essenes. The "letters hidden by those fleeing Roman forces" are from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt, a couple of generations later, found in other caves in the area.