Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit (Part 2)

[continued from Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit (Part 1)]

But lo and behold, there was a sign that said "Exhibit Continues". We followed it, and a man beckoned us into a theater. "The presentation is starting in five minutes," he said.

We entered the magnificent theater that contained very few people. Then the presentation started.

It was a very well-done video, about 5 minutes long, discussing the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a couple things of note in the video. One was that the groups of people who are thought to have written the scrolls, the Essenes, were a group of Jews who believed that the way the Pharisees and Sadducees were treating the Scripture was wrong. Therefore, there was going to be a judgment from God, and the Essenes did not want to get caught up in the calamity. They formed a commune in the desert called the Qumran, and spent their days dedicated to holiness and the preservation of Scripture, much like the CHristian monks who came along hundreds of years later. The second thing was the similarity between the Essene writers and the New Testament writers. While it is not advisable to draw too many conclusions from the Dead Sea Scrolls, they did seem to value the same Old Testament books as the New Testament books. More copies of Isaiah and Deuteronomy, for example, were found in the caves than any other book, suggesting that they valued these books more highly. The New Testament writers quote Isaiah and Deuteronomy the most.

At the end of the video, the stage behind the screen lit up in one area. It was a cave! They had built a small cave that you walk through prior to entering "The Scroll Room".

The Scroll Room was magnificent. It was laid out in such a way that you snaked your way through the exhibit in a back-and-forth patter, and each display was spaced out to allow an adequate number of people to view each display.

Each fragment was in a special display case that illuminated the text for 15 seconds, and then would turn off for 30 seconds. This was to preserve the delicate parchment for as long as possible.

The fragments were very small, for the most part, and it was difficult to see the text. However, there were some fragments that contained a large amount of text. Since I don't know Hebrew very well at all, I contented myself to picking out the names of God and basking in the pure ancientness of it all.

I must admit, if I had gone to this exhibit a couple of years earlier, I would have enjoyed the Dead Sea Scrolls a lot more. However, since I had just discovered that the New Testament papyrus fragments were so close to the originals, as well as all the other awesome stuff that I was learning about them, I would have to say that I was looking forward to the New Testament papyri a bit more. I had read about them and I was beyond stoked to see several ancient papyri a few inches from my face. My heart pounded as I rounded the corner to the New Testament section.

[to be continued...]

Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit (Part 1)

My friend and I headed to Ft. Worth, Texas, where an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls was being held. That's right. The Dead Sea Scrolls! The oldest pieces of the Bible we have! I could barely contain my excitement.

The first part of the exhibit was a treat. I thought it was just going to be the Dead Sea Scrolls there. I was in for a surprise. They had artifacts galore, such as coins, oil lamps, and goblets. Most interesting to me were some stone ossuaries with Hebrew and Greek inscriptions. I could make out quite a few of the letters, which was amazing, considering that I got a D+ in Hebrew.

One of the ossuaries stood out from the rest. It had, at one time, contained the bones of Alexander, the son of Simon of Cyrene. Simon of Cyrene was the one who carried Jesus' cross and in Mark 15:21, the gospel mentions that his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, were with him. It is not confirmed that the ossuary contained the bones of that particular Alexander son of Simon of Cyrene, but the odds of multiple Cyrenians being in Jerusalem are pretty low in the first place, with Alexander son of Simon being even lower. At any rater, it was great to see a possible artifact from a known character in the Bible. Click here for a picture (not sure if the picture is available for distribution so I didn't put it in here).

Immediately following the artifacts were a couple of rooms containing information about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then we entered a room containing facsimilies of the most famous Dead Sea Scrolls (the Isaiah scroll). At first, I wasn't sure what to think. Fascimilies are simply an image of the original scroll printed on thick paper and cut to resemble the shape of the original. For these particular facsimilies, the company that was hired to produce them took special care in getting the rips and tears just right, and even sewing the sheets together using thread made from authentic materials from the land.

However, they were just facsimilies. They were impressive to look at, but they weren't the originals. As time went on, I began to think that the originals were not on display here, and that the whole exhibit culminated in the facsimilies of the main scrolls.

We neared the end of that room and saw that it ended in a flight of stairs that let out into a lobby. My heart sank. This was it.

[to be continued...]

P52

Having been inspired by my research on the New Testament scribes, I decided I would try to reproduce the P52 fragment.

The first thing to get right was the shape.

As you can see, the fragment has a very unique shape. In fact, it's so recognized among the New Testament scholarly community that people have made memorabilia out of it, including ties. 

Since I didn't have any fancy equipment, I had to do it the hard way. I literally put a piece of paper up against my monitor and traced the outline of the image the best I could. Next, I transferred the tracing to the papyrus itself using a pencil, and then, using a straightedge razor, I cut the papyrus to the shape. Finally, I wrote the text on the papyrus (both sides) and aged it. It wasn't a perfect replica, but it did look good. I ended up giving it to a friend before I could manage to take a picture of it. One of these days I will manage to get a picture and upload it here.

The day after I gave my friend the P52 fragment, he and I went somewhere epic. Stay tuned to find out where!

Separated by 20 centuries

A few months ago, a professor at my old school shared a link to a free book (not free anymore though, unfortunately) called The Scribes. It is a historical fiction novel about textual criticism. I was skeptical that anything involving textual criticism could be exciting enough to write a piece of fiction about it, but I started reading and immediately was engaged.

It’s a story of two 3^rd-century scribes in Rome who notice discrepancies between the codex they are copying and a codex from Alexandria. They embark on an epic quest through the ancient Mediterranean world to solve the mystery of the differences in the two texts. They have many adventures and encounter a number of characters that would be familiar to students of the Early Church Age.

The writing is a little rough in some spots, but the story pushes you forward. He does not “Americanize” the characters (a flaw all too common in historical fiction), he treats each view of Christianity in the time period with appropriate respect, and drenches the reader with buckets of information of the era. It’s an immersive experience.

What hooked me was the beginning. The main character, Justin, begins to prepare a codex for writing. He takes sheets of papyrus and folds them together, creating “quires”. He then writes the gospel of Mark with a reed pen and ink, later binding all the quires together to form a codex.

I thought to myself, “Awesome! I have papyrus, a bamboo pen, and ink! Close enough!” I had known that the New Testament was written on papyrus, but I didn’t know that it was almost exclusively written on papyrus for the first few centuries after Christ, and I certainly wasn’t aware that a reed pen was used. I started researching and found many photos of the different papyrus fragments that have been discovered. It was exhilarating, because while these were not the originals, they were removed from the originals by a space of a hundred or two hundred years (or, if the rumors are true about the oldest papyrus found, a few decades!).

Another thing that got me excited was researching the oldest confirmed papyrus, the P52 fragment. The Wikipedia article describes this document as not having been written by a “practised scribe”. That is, the letters are not uniform, there is a bit of sloppiness, and the text is quite large in comparison to other texts. I thought, “This is great! An amateur scribe like me wrote the entire book of John!” I felt a kinship with that scribe. We both have a love for the scriptures that can’t be contained, even if we haven’t gone through years of training as a scribe.

What followed was an incredible journey that I will go over in the space of the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Trying something new

I started this blog as a way to keep me focused on my papyrus projects. As it turns out, I have been working on papyrus projects more or less steadily this whole time, such that I am just now updating this blog! I’ve completed a few projects and I am excited to share them with you over the next few weeks.

About a year ago, I did a project for a friend whose birthday was coming up. I had this idea to create a Koine Greek manuscript and to antique it so that it would appear to have just been discovered in an archaeological dig somewhere. Little did I know the path down which this would lead me.

I chose 1 Timothy 4:12 as the highlighted passage for this work, the verse that says: “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.”

I then did some research on the way that Koine Greek was written in the early days. At this point I knew almost nothing about it, except that they used mostly capital letters. I happened across a site that featured a few pictures of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest (mostly) complete manuscript in Greek. I copied the letters from the codex and matched them up with the Greek letters that I had learned in college. I wasn’t prepared for how different they were!

At one time I had thought that the ancient scribes wrote in all capital letters, which would correspond to the ones I knew:

                

            And I thought it would contain none of the lowercase letters:

              

            The ancient Koine Greek script actually contained a mixture of the two:

              

The credit for the Koine font above goes to Allan Loder. Click here if you would like to download the font.

For this project, I was using a script more similar to the script used in the Codex Sinaiticus. Looking back, it was a mistake to use this script on papyrus, since the Codex Sinaiticus was written on parchment, hundreds of years after the period I am interested in, when papyrus was predominant.

At any rate, away I went. I wrote the text in two columns (which was rare on papyrus, come to find out) and it turned out pretty well. I then tore into it with my hands and used a knife to cut some of the edges. I worked it into a nice fragment shape:

Then I took a piece of sandpaper and applied it to the text itself, in some cases obliterating a letter or two. I then bought a nice frame that made the fragment appear as if it were floating in midair. I gave it to my friend and he liked it.

I ended up with a pretty nice piece, but with several historical inaccuracies. These were:

• I used the Codex Sinaiticus script on papyrus
• I wrote the text itself in two columns, a practice that was fairly rare in the early days. If they did it, they also would have written it in a much more beautiful script than I had the talent for at that time.
• I did not look up any variant readings to try and determine what the original text would have been.
• I did not use any nomina sacra (I didn’t even know what those were at the time)

There are three others that are forgivable since my resources are limited here in the US:

1. The first would be the type of ink. The type of ink the ancients would have used is not in very high supply here in the US. It would have been iron gall ink, most likely, and while it is possible to make it, I’m not quite there yet. 
2. The second inaccuracy is the type of papyrus. At the time that I made this, I didn’t know much about papyrus, only that it was available at my local art supply stores and that it was cheap enough to buy moderate quantities and experiment with it. Without getting into too much detail, the art of making papyrus paper was actually lost hundreds of years ago and only revived last century. Click here for a link to the story. As a result, the quality of papyrus that has managed to make its way to the United States is limited. There are 4 types, and they are all the same. It is rare to find a sheet of papyrus that looks the same as the ancient manuscripts.
3. The third one was the type of pen. I used a bamboo pen because it was the best I could come up with. I didn’t have a feather pen (they don’t sell them in stores here) and I was pretty sure the ancient scribes didn’t use brushes to write on papyrus. It wasn’t until later that I realized how close I really was, though.

I was surprised at how easy it was to produce this piece. I ended up with a pretty nice piece of art. It didn’t take too long and it wasn’t cost-prohibitive. I really liked the idea, but at the time, I was kind of focusing on Egyptian, so I shelved it for the time being. I knew that it was a project that would make a nice gift sometime down the road.

The Hebrew Shema

I have finally created a manuscript that I had been wanting to create for some time: a Paleo-Hebrew version of the Shema that is contained in a mezzuzah. I wrote on the front and the back, but only got as far as the one passage in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. The true Shema also contains Deuteronomy 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41. Click here to see what the Shema normally looks like today.



Here is the front side of the manuscript.



















Here is the back:

Here is a close-up of the text:

Like my Psalm 119 scroll, I used the Tel Dan script but this time I left spaces between the lines and increased the length of the tails for the characters that go below the line. For those interested, that would be bet, mem, nun, and kaph. I think it resulted in a more beautiful style.

Happy 4th of July!

This is my attempt at English calligraphy. Or, I guess I should say, American calligraphy. Sorry the picture is kind of blurry - my camera is not amazing.

This is a piece of the Declaration of Independence, written on this day 236 years ago. I have always been a fan of the writing style of the document - in fact, I copied some elements of it for the writing that I use on a daily basis. for instance, the way the "s" stops at the end of the word instead of continuing on, as most letters do. I adopted that. In the above picture, you can see that the word "powers" ends this way.

It was also impressive to see how readable it is to this day. Most of the grammar is the same as it is today, and the spellings are mostly the same.

I was going to write, "I was in awe to write the same words that Thomas Jefferson wrote," but I realized that I wasn't sure if Thomas Jefferson was the one who actually took up the pen and wrote the copy of the Declaration that we know today. I did a little researching and discovered that it was actually a gentleman by the name of Timothy Matlack. He penned quite a few documents, including the commission of George Washington to the post of Commander-in-Chief.

The caption under his signature says "American Scribe". Me too, Tim. Me too.

Cursive hieroglyphics

My new project will be an original short story written in Middle Egyptian, in a type of script called hieratic. This script was developed because hieroglyphics take a long time to write. Scribes developed a shortened version of these characters so that it would be easier to write the characters, resulting in a sort of ancient cursive writing.

Below is an example of this writing. It is a document written in around 1600 B.C. and it describes 48 different types of medical treatment. In my opinion, it's absoulely gorgeous.

A close-up look of the pages:

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The difficult part is that many of the characters look almost nothing like the original hieroglyphics, and as I have begun learning Middle Egyptian with the originals, I will have to learn many of the symbols from scratch. This undertaking will be massive and I don't expect to finish any time soon. So, in fact, I hesitate to call it my "next" project, since I'd like to get in some other projects before that. More on that later.

Here are the steps that I will need to take to write an original short story in hieratic:

1. Progress in my Middle Egyptian grammar a few more lessons so as to get a rudimentary understanding of the language (currently I'm on lesson 10 of 33 but a lot of the later lessons are nuances and exceptions that will help you understand Egyptian inscriptions)
2. Write out a story in English that will have simple concepts and thus be easier to translate
3. Translate it into Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics
4. Transcribe the story into hieratic script
5. Format the text on regular paper the way it will appear in the finished product.
6. Using scratch papyrus, practice each line 2 or 3 times so it looks fluid and natural
7. Produce the final papyrus

Step 1 will take the longest, obviously, so while I'm doing that, I will be posting other, simpler projects, as well as ones that I have done in the past. There are still quite a few awesome ones I haven't posted yet.

Stay tuned.

Untitled Project with Monolithic Papyrus Sheets

A few weeks ago I bought a couple of papyrus sheets at a local art store. In a previous post, I had explained that as a general rule, the darker the papyrus, the more authentic it is. So I bought two of the darkest sheets there. The one on the right is actually the smaller of the two. I like its texture the best. It almost looks like bark. Has a funny smell too. Not exactly pleasant, but a natural smell nonetheless.

The other sheet (below) is much longer. This will be used for a longer project and possibly linked with other, similar sheets. I will not be using this one yet.

I'm not ready to reveal what my next project will be, but I'll give you a hint: I will be using a brush, after the manner of the original practitioners of this writing form.

Any guesses? Feel free to comment below.

The tablets

Some time before the creation of the Psalm 119 scroll, I had always wanted to know how clay tablets with inscriptions on them would look, feel, and sound. Being extremely interested in Ancient Near Eastern history, I was fascinated by clay tablets and how whole civilizations based their economy on them. In fact, the origin of writing can be traced back to clay tablets. For the Wikipedia article that gives you an overview, click here.

So, I decided to go for it. Since I love Paleo-Hebrew (could you tell?) I thought I'd write the 1st chapter of Genesis on clay tablets, using my favorite script - the Tel Dan stele script. Now there is absolutely no evidence that the Israelites ever used clay tablets for writing, but I thought it was cool so I went ahead and did it anyway.

The preparation process was painstaking. I had to translate the Masoretic Hebrew script (see my previous post, Paleo-Hebrew comparison) into Paleo-Hebrew letter by letter. I had a digital version of the Hebrew Old Testament on one side of the screen, and my word processor on the other side, typing what I saw and interpreting each alef, bet, gimmel, etc. into Roman alphabetic keystrokes, which in turn showed up in Paleo-Hebrew script on my word processor. Makes me tired remembering that. Come to think of it, that's what I had to do with my Psalm 119 scroll, too.

Once I had the Paleo-Hebrew transcription printed out on sheets of paper, it was time to make the tablets. I took some Prang self-hardening clay and sliced it with a knife into four tablets (at the time, I didn't know it was going to be four). I then massaged the slice of clay with my hands until I got a good tablet.

I then used a mechanical pencil to carefully incise the surface of the tablet with the Hebrew characters. At first, I wasn't sure it would work, as a test with some regular clay proved to be disastrous. I then realized that it depended on the wetness of the clay. If it was too wet, the clay was too easy to penetrate with the thin tool I was using. This would result in a line that was too thin and could be easy to erase by accident. If it was too dry, the clay would clump up and be virtually impossible to write on.

So I used a careful application of spray bottle, keeping the surface just moist enough to allow a perfect incision that, if done correctly, would cause the surrounding clay to follow the pencil downwards slightly. Needless to say, from the photos below it is easy to see that this was not achieved every time. Take this close-up, for instance:

This was my first tablet and there so are many signs of amateur craftsmanship that I cringe to look at it today. Some of the places where the letter curves were particularly difficult, so I was forced to employ a sort of pointillism in achieving the flowing lines. You can see the evidence of this if you look closely. Later on in the project, I learned how to avoid this, resulting in a better-looking body of text:

The clustering of the text toward the bottom of Tablet 3 looks cool, but was really a result of poor planning. I was trying to avoid ending a tablet in the middle of a verse, and as a result I ended up cramming dozens of characters into a tiny spot.

It felt good to finish the project. When they were dried, I now had four clay tablets that made a satisfying clinking sound when they rub together, similar to what the ancients heard thousands of years ago.

  All four tablets together

 Another close-up

The finished product

Finally, after a few months, I had my first full scroll, complete with all 22 stanzas of Psalm 119 and handles with finials.

Not sure why I took this picture with a bowl of fruit, but I guess it looks kind of awesome.

This concludes my first full scroll. I will be creating other projects in the future. In fact, I had done 3 projects prior to this and I will be posting those soon.

On to the Finials!

No scroll is complete without finials. The finials are the little handle things on either side of the scroll, that always look so cool in movies when they unfurl it.

To make them, I took four wooden discs, four wooden candle holders, and four wooden spheres. I glued them together and stained them with a dark wood stain.

After they had been allowed to set for a while, I wiped the finials dry with a paper towel and left the core stain still on the wood. I did this a couple of times.

Next - the finished product!

Paleo-Hebrew comparison

How does Paleo-Hebrew compare to more "modern" Hebrew? That is, the Hebrew script I employed in this scroll doesn't look anything like you may have seen here and there.

Here's a comparison chart:

Hebrew alphabets

The big scroll project I was doing back in 2009 involved a script of Hebrew that is not the one that is in use today by Biblical scholars or the Israeli nation.

It is called Paleo-Hebrew and it was employed from around 1200-500 B.C. It underwent a lot of changes during that time, but any script that is strictly Hebrew in that span would be considered Paleo-Hebrew.

It is said to be evolved from Phoenecian, which in turn evolved from Ugaritic. The origins of Ugaritic are clearly Mesopotamian. However, a text in the Sinai peninsula contained a proto-Canaanite script, which could indicate a different story.

Whatever the case, I find the Paleo-Hebrew script beautiful and love working with it. To the right you can see the Tel-Dan stele's inscription. It is purported to contain the earliest (and only) extra-biblical reference to the "house of David" (bet David).

How about Paleo-Hebrew on papyrus? Unfortunately, we do not have many examples. The best renderings of Paleo-Hebrew are found on stone. There are a few extant texts on papyrus, the most notable being the inclusion of the tetragrammaton (YHWH, the holy name of God) in Masoretic Hebrew texts and even Greek.

Despite the scanty evidence, however, I decided to move forward with my papyrus scroll written in Paleo-Hebrew, confident that some ancient scribe must have written on sheets of papyrus in this fantastic script in days gone by.

First Full Scroll

I created this scroll back in 2009. I used a bamboo pen with India ink on papyrus. However, I believe this style of papyrus not to be papyrus at all, but rather banana leaves, due to some research on Youtube. It appears that papyrus that is translucent (that is, the papyrus that "looks" like papyrus to most partakers of popular culture) is actually banana leaves. For authentic papyrus, you must look for the darker, opaque sheets.

The image at left shows the first 3 stanzas of the scroll. The text was taken from 119th Psalm of the Bible. Since this Psalm was most likely not written by David, unlike many other Psalms, I used a script of Paleo-Hebrew that would align with the period of the Divided Kingdom of Israel. I chose the script from the Tel Dan Stele.

Psalm 119 is an acrostic Psalm - that is, each verse of any particular stanza will begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Since Hebrew reads from right to left, you would look at the right-most character to see this effect. As you can see, the first letters - aleph, bet, and gimel - begin the first three stanzas. You can also see the beginning of the next three: dalet, he, and vav.

 Close-up of the text

The bamboo pen at work