The entire collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Washington DC Bible Museum turned out to be fake. This was stated by independent researchers from the Art Fraud Insights company.
The administration of the Bible Museum in Washington said that all 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were called "some of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century," turned out to be a modern forgery. This conclusion was made by Art Fraud Insights. In 2018, the museum said some parts of the scrolls were fakes. The administration removed these fragments from the exhibit, and later recruited counterfeiters to research the rest of their collection.
In a 200-page report, the organization said the artifacts were made from ancient leather to mimic historical artifacts, but have been modified with modern ink. “They were applied to preexisting surface deposits. Fake mineral deposits were applied to the forgeries after they were written to give the impression that the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were genuine,”the experts noted.
Experts said they made it to the collection in 2017. Then the Bible Museum bought fragments of the Dead Sea manuscripts taken from the National Museum of Iraq. These fragments appeared on the art market in 2002, their authenticity was questioned many times. Other parts of this collection are believed to be from the University of Usus Pacific in California and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas.
After an exhaustive review of all the images and the results of scientific analysis, it turned out that none of the text fragments of the collection of the scrolls of the Museum of the Bible are authentic. Moreover, each exhibit has characteristics that suggest that it is a deliberate forgery, created in the early 2000s in order to imitate authentic fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, - said the company.
At the same time, the researchers do not question that 100 thousand original fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which are in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, are original. Some of them are well preserved, some are represented only by small fragments. They contain the oldest known texts of the Old Testament.
Ilnur Sharafiev