The price asked was 3 million (approximately $5.6 million). I was very intrigued and increasingly desperate to let some scholar know about their existence, perhaps to secure access for them.Īs the cardboard sheets were removed from the trunks, I was told that the owners were trying to sell the documents to an unspecified European government. This collection was a treasure trove of ancient documents. The Aramaic or Hebrew texts looked, at first sight, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I had seen before, although they were written mostly on parchment. I knew that it was common for such wrappings to bear sacred texts, and so the owners of this hoard must have unwrapped at least a mummy or two. Accompanying them were Egyptian mummy wrappings inscribed in demotic – the written form of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The texts were written in Aramaic or Hebrew. And on each sheet, I was horrified to note, there were hundreds of pieces of papyrus text roughly fixed to the cardboard by small strips of clear adhesive tape. They were stuffed full of exact-fitting sheets of cardboard. The Jordanian then produced a set of keys and unlocked the trunks. From the little conversation that ensued (which was in Arabic), I gathered that permission had been requested an obtained. The Jordanian made a telephone call to Amman. They then brought a telephone into the room and departed, locking the door behind them. As the second was carried in, one of the officials said pointedly, as if “for the record”: “We don’t know what is in these trunks. As we all stood around a table placed in the middle of the room, making desultory small talk, the bank officials carried in two wooden trunks and laid them down before us.
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