PHYSICAL, MATERIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL LINKS BETWEEN QUMRAN AND AKHETATEN
Historians and archaeologists have noted many differences in various technical aspects of the scrolls’ manufacture between techniques used by the Qumran-Essenes and those of mainstream Jewish society, and in the design of structures and other objects used at Qumran. These differences have just not had any satisfactory explanation. Virtually all of these ‘mechanical’ anomalies can, however, be explained by the connections that I have made between the Qumran-Essenes and the Egypt of Akhenaten.
WRITING MEDIA
The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on leather or skins, except for a few fragments written on papyrus or pieces of ceramic and, of course, one engraved on copper. Papyrus was not used in the Holy Land until around 190 BCE. Prior to that time writing was on potsherds (pieces of broken pottery); one assumes there was some use of leather, but no examples are known from Israel prior to the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Examples from outside Israel of the use of leather date back to 2000 BCE Egypt.1
Ruled Lines
An intriguing characteristic seen in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls (notably the Commentary on the Book of Habakkuk) is the use of vertically ruled lines to separate columns, and horizontal ruling. It is extremely rare for papyrus (or leather) to be ruled horizontally in this manner, as the lines of fibre are sufficient guide to writing in straight lines. Ruled Aramaic or Hebrew papyri are virtually unknown prior to 68 BCE.2 There are however examples of Egyptian papyri ruled both vertically and horizontally, for example in the British Museum’s collection from the ‘Book of the Dead’.
The Red Ink Mystery
Another link can be made from the strange existence of apparently random passages and words written with red ink in three of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most notable are the examples in the scroll 4QNumbers, shown in Eugene Ulrich and Frank Moore Cross’s contribution to Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VII, Qumran Cave 4.3 However, the significance of this phenomenon has not yet been determined.4 The practice was unknown in Israel or in any other country, except ancient Egypt.5 Coincidentally the main source of red pigment in Egypt was from the Elephantine region, and one can conjecture a connection between the Jewish Community at Ab, utilizing the local red ink, and a harking back to this old usage by the Essene Community at Qumran.
Analyses using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) have shown that the inks used in writing the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls were all based on carbonaceous pigment – either lampblack or soot, with traces of copper, lead and bromine6 – not unusual for the period or location of the scribal activity. What is surprising, however, is their use of red ink to highlight sections of some of the scrolls – a practice unknown in Judaea at the time, or previously. XRF analysis has shown the red ink to contain mercury in the form of its sulphide compound (HgS), which derives from a naturally occurring mineral known as cinnabar. This finding was totally perplexing, as cinnabar is not present in Israel.
Why would the Qumran-Essenes go to the trouble and expense of importing red pigment or even want to use it in the first place?
The answer is by now all too familiar. Red ink was selectively used in ancient Egypt for scribal texts and was in use at the time of Akhenaten. There are good examples of scribal palettes from this period in the Museum of Liverpool, and in the Tutankhamun collection in the Cairo Museum. These examples show the use of two separate palette containers for black and red ink, and many Egyptian religious documents, dating back to at least the fifteenth century BCE, show red ink being used to highlight sections of text.
In the spring of 1949, Lankester Harding and Father Roland de Vaux collected samples of textiles from the floor of Cave 1 at Qumran, which were carbon-14 dated in 1950, by Dr W. F. Libby at the University of Chicago, to between 167 BCE and 237 CE. Samples were subsequently sent to England for analysis.7
When the first box of samples was opened, at HM Norfolk Flax Establishment, it gave off a smell ‘like that of an ancient Egyptian tomb’. Much of the material was identified as being fine-quality flax of natural colour or with blue-dyed lines, which had been used as scroll wrappers or jar covers for some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are no known examples of similar wrappers from Judaea of the period, or prior to it, and exact dating of the material is therefore quite a problem. However, because the material is entirely of flax and contains no wool, there is one indicator of its date. To quote Dominique Barthélemy and Jozef Milik:
The indigo lines suggest at once the blue of the fine linen of Ancient Egypt, where until the Coptic period [395–641 CE], there was a strong religious prejudice against the use of wool. Perhaps it was the conservatism of Jewish piety that assured the continuance of the Ancient Egyptian practice into the last centuries BC and even later.8
As in ancient Egypt, the Qumran yarn was all spun with the natural twist of the fibre (S-spun), and some of the cloths had fringes. Barry Kemp, an eminent Cambridge University archaeologist, has been excavating at the site of Akhetaten for many years, and in his study of the local textile industry he noted that it was normal to weave fringes onto the bottom hem of flaxen cloths.9
Yet another, crucial, factor entered my analysis of the linen cloth wrappers found with some of the jars of the Dead Sea Scrolls: they bore an embroidered pattern of concentric squares, which appeared to the original investigators to allude to ‘the ground plan of some religious building’. The embroidered weave consists of six concentric rectangles and ‘presents a most intriguing problem, for the blue weft threads actually turn round corners and become warps’. Clearly great effort and technical skill were employed to achieve the desired design.
Comparisons with a description of the ‘idealized temple’ in the Temple Scroll show that the ‘ground plan’ bears a remarkable resemblance to the ground plan of this ‘hypothetical’ temple described in the scroll. I have already suggested there is evidence that the Temple Scroll contains a description of the City of Akhetaten, and further comparison of this ‘hypothetical’ temple shows it, in turn, to have remarkable correspondences to the Great Temple of Akhenaten.
So where does that leave this particular investigation? It seems to me that the skills and technology needed to produce the woven materials associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in Cave 1 at Qumran, cannot have been acquired from other local craftsmen. All the indications are that the weavers of Qumran used similar techniques to those used in ancient Egypt – techniques existing at the time of Akhenaten some 1,000 years earlier – and that there are many similarities in the Essenes’ type of woven cloth to that produced at Akhetaten.
The material the Qumran-Essenes used to wrap their holy texts makes a strong link back to Akhenaten; the pattern they wove on to the material also makes a strong link back to the idealized temple of the Temple Scroll and the actual temple at Akhetaten.
The intense prejudice amongst the Egyptian priesthood against mixing wool and flax, by the way, helps to explain another modern ‘chok’ (forbidden thing) that has no accepted reasoning. Orthodox Jewish law forbids the mixing or wearing of wool and linen together. There is also a Biblical injunction regarding the wearing of prayer shawls, for example, in Numbers 15:37–41:
And the Lord spoke to Moses saying: ‘Speak to the children of Israel and bid them that they make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringes of the corners a thread of blue…’
One can thus also conjecture that the type of textiles used at Akhetaten was a forerunner for the present-day prayer shawls that are used in synagogues by congregants, and that the ‘Biblical blue’ is the same as that preserved in the linen fragments found at Qumran.
HYDROMECHANICS AND CLEANLINESS
When the Essene sect’s obsession with ritual washing is considered, the close proximity to water of Qumran, Elephantine Island and Lake Tana in Ethiopia should not be overlooked. The thread of ritual cleansing by water, as part of religious practice, and the need for a readily available water supply may well be traceable back from these locations to the sacred pools of the Egyptian temples, and again more specifically to the Great Temple at Akhetaten.
As a result of Roland de Vaux’s first excavations at Qumran in the early 1950s, he came to the conclusion that the large number of ‘cisterns’ within the buildings’ grounds had been installed as a means of storing water, and that only two were possibly for ritual washing. This was despite the fact that Josephus, the Damascus Document and the ‘Manual of Discipline’ (now generally known as the ‘Rule of the Community’) spoke of the need for frequent purification by water.
Modern scholars now consider almost all the ‘cisterns’ to be ‘Mikvah’ – baths specially designed for ritual washing. Ronny Reich, of Haifa University and the Israel Antiquities Authority, counts ten stepped ‘Mikvaot’ at Qumran.10 They are not dissimilar to others excavated at Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, except for one – which has its stepped area divided into partitions making it a four-section bath. Quite why the Qumran-Essenes should have required so many ‘ritual bath’ constructions is uncertain.
Knowing what I have discovered about the orientations of the buildings at Qumran, and how they are closely aligned to those of the Great Temple at Akhetaten, it is, perhaps, no surprise to find that there were also ten ‘lavers’ or ritual baths within the Great Temple area. Eight of these ‘lavers’ were in the Second Sanctuary and the other two in the court of the Great Altar.
At the back of the temple are seen eight oblong lavers or bathing tanks, and all the material for a ceremonial offering, a rite prescribed perhaps before entering the second sanctuary…Near the altar are four erections, two of which appear to be lavers, divided into four basins each, corresponding to those at the smaller temple.11
The similarity in numbers of the ritual baths at Qumran to those at Akhetaten, and the ‘unique’ construction of four-section baths at both sites, cannot be a coincidence.
The ritual use of water and cleanliness is taken up, in turn, by the Essenes, John the Baptist and Jesus in spiritual baptism, by the Jews in spiritual and ritual cleansing in the ‘Mikvah’ or place of washing and by the Muslims in their triple washing ritual prior to prayer.
Still on the subject of cleanliness, Josephus, talking about the ablutionary habits of the Qumranites, quotes:
‘…[they] wrap their mantle about them so that they may not offend the rays of the deity…’.
(Again, we cannot escape the allusion to God as being represented by the hands of the sun.)
The Qumran-Essenes were in the habit of carrying a mattock or hoe-like tool, which they used for tidying up after relieving themselves. Once again I did not have to look too far to find an explanation for this unusual practice – quite unique to the Qumran-Essenes in Judaea. It was during the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt that ‘shabti’ (small statues) are first seen carrying mattocks!12
Why would the Qumran-Essenes, a relatively poor and isolated community, go to the trouble and expense of importing these materials and applying these techniques when other, local alternatives were available? Where did they get the knowledge required to utilize these relatively unknown materials and techniques? Unknown not just in their native land but also in the rest of the Middle East, apart from Egypt.
The only logical conclusion that can be reached from the evidence is that the Qumran-Essenes deliberately chose to use Egyptian materials and techniques because they had a determined affinity to Egypt, and to a period dating back a thousand years before their time.
They either went to the extreme expense and inconvenience of importing the materials and learning the technologies from contemporary Egyptian sources, or (and I believe this is the much more likely explanation), they had the materials and technical knowledge already in their possession – handed down to them by their Egyptian predecessors who left Egypt with Moses.
Not only did the ancestors of the Essenes bring out material possessions and technical knowledge, they also inherited from Egypt the system of beliefs that permeated the entire Hebrew culture in a watered down format.