A Relief from Portus showing a Writer at a Desk

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

Following up on my post about a relief showing writers at desks at Ostia, I should also mention a second artifact found in the same region. It is a relief uncovered in the nineteenth century at Portus (just north of Ostia) and now in the Torlonia Collection.

Relief from Portus showing the offloading of a ship at port (Torlonia Collection inv. 428); image source: ostia-antica.org

The relief shows two people unloading cargo from a ship, while workers at the dock or warehouse keep records. One worker is seated on a chair at a desk with either tablets or a codex, apparently writing with the right hand.1

This relief is, to the best of my knowledge, not securely dated. The catalog of the Torlonia collection describes the date in very loose terms: “The present sculpture seems to date back to the 3rd century CE.”2

I don’t know the exact circumstances of its discovery, and I haven’t had the chance to see the relief in person. It would be nice to be able to establish a more precise date for this piece. If it is in fact from the third century, it would constitute quite early visual evidence for the use of desks for writing.

  1. This is the description of Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), plate XXVI: “Relief in Greek marble (m. 0.43 x 0.33), found at Porto, now in the Torlonia Museum. Visconti, Catalogo, n. 338. Wine is being unloaded from a merchantman. The three seated figures may be a tabularius with two adiutores, recording the cargo on wax tablets in the form of a book. The leading porter receives a ? tally as he passes. Perhaps a customs scene.” Meiggs uses the catalog number from Visconti’s catalog of 1880. The relief is number 336 in Pietro Ercole Visconti, Catalogo del Museo Torlonia di scuture antiche (Rome, 1876), p. 170. ↩︎
  2. Carlo Lodovico Visconti, I monumenti del Museo Torlonia (Rome: 1885), p. 304: “Sembra doversi riferire la presente scultura al III. secolo dell’era volgare.” ↩︎
Posted in Codices, desks, Ostia, Tablets | 2 Comments

A Relief from Ostia Showing Writers at Desks

Posted on August 11, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

The museum at the archaeological park at Ostia Antica has reopened after many years of closure for renovations. The results are quite impressive, and I hope to have a chance to post some reflections about the museum itself soon, but I thought I would highlight a piece that has interested me for some time and which I was quite excited to see in person. It is a relatively small marble relief that is roughly square (51 cm wide, 49 cm high):


Ostia Antiquarium, inv. 130; image source: Brent Nongbri, 2024

The relief was reportedly found at the Aula della Are in 1938. Its date of production is not clear. It is typically assigned to the late fourth century (as it is described in the current museum didactic material). Eric Turner, however, described it in the following way: “The date is not earlier than late ii A.D., and may be iv-v A.D.”1

What is being depicted in the relief is also open to debate. There have been a number of different suggestions: A lecture at a philosophical school, a Christian speaker whose words are being recorded by scribes, a courtroom or other scene with stenographers (shorthand writers), or an auction. The function of the relief is also unknown. Guido Calza suggested that it was the shop sign of a professional copyist. No interpretation commands wide assent.

Among all these unknowns, one thing that is clear is that the two figures in the lower left and the lower right corners are seated at tables or desks, and they are writing in what look like large sets of bound wooden tablets (although parchment or papyrus codices are also possible interpretations).


Ostia Antiquarium, inv. 130, detail showing a writer at work while seated at a table or desk; image source: Brent Nongbri, 2024

This piece is thus generally acknowledged as one of the earliest depictions of writers at work at desks. It is commonly believed that writers did not regularly use desks, tables, or stands before this period. Theodor Birt’s statement is typical: “In antiquity, people did not write on desks.”2 I am skeptical of this view for a variety of reasons, but it is the consensus.

The classic treatment of the question is Bruce Metzger, “When Did Scribes Begin to Use Desks?”3 At the time Metzger raised the issue (the late 1950s), the common knolwedge was that writers did not use desks until rather late in the medieval period. Metzger gathered data (including this relief) to show that the use of desks by writers in the premodern Mediterranean went back as least as early as the fourth century, and his broader conclusion is surely correct: “In seeking to discover when it was that scribes began to use a writing desk, one must not imagine that the habits of all scribes changed suddenly. The transition from the custom of writing on one’s lap to the custom of using a desk or table must have taken place gradually.”

It is good to be able to have a close look at this interesting relief, which is an important piece of evidence in connection to this question.

  1. Eric G. Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1987), p. 6, note 17. The exact archaeological context in which the relief was found does not appear to have been discussed in print in any detail. ↩︎
  2. Theodor Birt, Die Buchrolle in der Kunst (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907), p. 209: “Im Altertum schrieb man nicht auf Pulten.” ↩︎
  3. I cite from the chapter published in Bruce M. Metzger, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 123-137, but Metzger notes that the chapter is drawn from material originally published in different outlets in the late 1950s. ↩︎
Posted in Archaeological context, Codices, desks, Ostia, Tablets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Manuscripts of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I’ve had occasion recently to do a bit of work on a couple of Cicero’s letters to Atticus. Both the old text of Tyrrell and Purser and the more recent text of Shackleton Bailey are wonderful resources, but there are a couple of places where I wanted to check the manuscripts. About half of the most important manuscripts are available online. A set of links seems like it would be useful. Among the primary witnesses, there are:

E = Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana E 14 inf. (14th century; thanks to Jenny Lynn for the link)
G = Paris, BnF Latin 16248 (14th-15th century)
H = Piacenza, Biblioteca Civica Passerini-Landi, Landianus 8 (14th-15th century) not online
M = Florence, BML Plut. 49.18 (1392-1393)
N = Florence, BML Conv.Soppr. 49 (14th-15th century) not online
O = Turin, Lat. 495 (15th century) not online
R = Paris, BnF Latin 8538 (1419)
P = Paris, BnF Latin 8536 (15th century)
V = Vatican, Pal. Lat. 1510 (15th century)

W= a set of dispersed folia from an 11th century codex as follows:

  • Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.misc.f.21, not online
  • Würzburg, Diözesanarchiv, Fragm. Würzburg, St. Ulrich, not online
  • Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 29220(20, not online

Among the witnesses usually considered less important for establishing the critical text:

b = Berlin, Staatsbibliothek 168 (15th century) not online
d = Florence, BML Edili 217 (15th century) not online
m = Berlin Staatsbibliothk Ham. 166 (1408, copied by Poggio)
s = Vatican, Urb. Lat. 322 (15th century)

If I’ve missed the proper links for any of the pieces that I’ve marked as “not online,” I would be grateful for the right links.

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plutei 49.18, fol. 82 verso
Posted in Cicero | 4 Comments

Digital Images of Codex Bobiensis Online

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I’m not sure when this happened, but the surviving folia of Codex Bobiensis (or Bobbiensis, CLA 4 465) have been photographed and the images made available online here. Codex Bobiensis is a copy of the Gospel According to Mark and the Gospel According to Matthew in Latin, probably produced in North Africa at some point in the late fourth or early fifth century.

The surviving leaves of this codex present a fascinating set of early variant readings in Mark and Matthew that formed the topic of a 2021 article by Matthew Larsen.

For the basics about the codex and a transcription, one can consult Wordsworth, Sanday, and White, Portions of the Gospels according to St. Mark and St. Matthew from the Bobbio ms. (1886). It’s good to see this manuscript online.

Posted in Codex Bobiensis | 2 Comments

Gerald Lankester Harding’s Qumran Cave 1Q Excavation Photos

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I think a copy of Gerald Lankester Harding’s photographs of the Cave 1Q manuscripts as they were being excavated in 1949 may be at the École biblique in Jerusalem.

The back story: When I was writing an article on the Cave 1Q scrolls a few years ago, I ran into a problem that I just could not solve. Nearly all the evidence I surveyed suggested that there was no sure connection between any of the rolls that Muhammad ed Dhib is said to have found and the cave now known as 1Q. Nearly all the evidence. The one indicator that pointed in another direction was a claim from John Trever. Here is how I put it in the article:

“Trever makes a curiously specific claim regarding one fragment of this text: ‘A small piece of 1QSb (Col. II) also was sifted from the debris’ during the excavation of Cave 1. I can find no corroboration of Trever’s statement, but if it were correct, this fragment would constitute a material connection between Cave 1 and the three scrolls associated with Muhammad ed-Dhib. Thus, it would be very useful to see if Trever’s statement can be somehow confirmed or disconfirmed.”

I added the following long footnote that invoked Harding’s photos as a possible path forward:

“In theory, Trever’s claim could be either confirmed or disconfirmed by reference to photographs taken by Harding at the time of the excavation itself in 1949. As Harding wrote in DJD I: ‘Inscribed fragments were mounted between glass each day as they were found, and photographed on the spot for safe record’ (Gerald Lankester Harding, ‘Introductory: The Discovery, the Excavation, Minor Finds,’ in Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 3–7, at 7). While a very small group of these photographs seems to have been published (see the bibliography in Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave I, 43), I have been unable to locate the original copies of this set of excavation photographs. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities did not respond to my queries concerning these photographs. Stephen Reed reports that the John C. Trever Collection of photographs includes some of Harding’s images (see Stephen A. Reed, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Michael B. Phelps, The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers [RBS 32; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994] 451–52). According to the descriptions Reed provides, the Harding photos in the Trever collection seem to contain a mix of excavated and purchased materials, so these may not be the excavation photos that Harding mentioned. I contacted James Trever, the son of John Trever, in July 2020 to try to obtain copies of this material, but he was unable to locate these photographs or negatives. Among the PAM photographs, at least one sequence seems to derive from Harding (PAM 40.433–40.552). Although the date given for the photographs is April 1953, these images appear to be photographs of earlier photographs by Harding (PAM 40.508 is actually labeled “MR LANCASTER HARDINGS (sic) PHOTOGRAPH A1”). Again, these contain a mix of excavated and purchased materials, and none of them seems to match the published photographs mentioned in DJD I, 43. The recovery of Harding’s excavation photographs is a desideratum.”

The early photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls present a number of challenges. Even guides by good scholars can be misleading or just wrong (here’s a case from Tov and Pfann, Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls Microfiche Edition, 2nd rev. ed; Leiden: Brill, 1995).

The Harding photos said to be a part of Trever’s collection continue to escape me. Trevor’s photos are now at the University of Chicago, and I have been assured that copies of Harding’s photos are not among them.

But, while digging around for photographs of Muhammed ed Dhib over the last couple weeks, I came across a piece of evidence that I somehow missed while conducting my search for copies of Harding’s Cave 1Q excavation photos: It may be the case that the École biblique in Jerusalem holds copies of these pictures. In the first volume of the Qumran excavation report, the following note accompanies one of the photographic sources (Lot 8, on p. 404):

“Date et circonstances. M. Lankester Harding, alors directeur des Antiquités de Jordanie, a représenté pendant les campagnes de fouilles à Qumrân, le service des Antiquités qui patronnait les travaux. Bon photographe, il a pris une centaine de clichés de synthèse, en général de bonne qualité.
Dépôt. Les archives photographiques de Lankester Harding ont été déposées aux archives photographiques du service des Antiquités de Jordanie. Les négatifs ont été rangés dans des classeurs à couverture grise et les contacts dans des classeurs à couverture rouge. Une copie de toute la série avait été donnée par l’auteur à l’École biblique, où les clichés ont été intégrés aux albums de la photothèque. Toute une série de documents concernant les manuscrits et les circonstances de leur découverte a été réalisée par Lankester Harding. Les documents ont été déposés aux archives photographiques du service des Antiquités de Jordanie où leur numéro d’inventaire est précédé dans les registres de la lettre A. Puisqu’ils ne concernent pas les travaux de chantier, nous ne les avons pas intégrés à notre liste; cependant, nous en donnons ici la liste, à titre indicatif A 1 393-1 492 (objets trouvés avec les manuscrits), A 1 493-1 500 et 1 536-1537 (manuscrits enveloppés dans des toiles de lin), A 1 538-1 539, A 1 652-1 672, A 2 069-2 077, A 2 341-2 353 (objets trouvés avec les manuscrits).”1

The 95 photos from the Harding collection that are individually described in this volume are almost all from the 1950s excavation, with just 12 from the 1949 campaign. But it sounds like there is a reasonably good chance that copies of the daily manuscript photos from the 1949 excavations might be found at the École biblique photo archive. Let us hope so.

PAM 40.508; image source: The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
  1. Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Alain Chambon, Fouilles de Khirbet Qumrân et de Aïn Feshkha I: Album de photographies (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 404. ↩︎
Posted in Archaeological context, Dead Sea Scrolls, Find Stories | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Another Photo of Muhammad ed-Dhib

Posted on July 26, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

Thanks to Asaf Gayer for pointing out that there is another excellent photo of Muhammad ed-Dhib to add to the small group of photos of the alleged finders of the first scrolls that I discussed in an earlier post. This picture was probably taken in 1963 and appears in the Wadi ed-Daliyeh excavation volume (Muhammad ed Dhib is identified as the man on the left; the fellow on the right holding the bat is not identified by name):

Paul W. Lapp and Nancy L. Lapp (eds.), Discoveries in the Wâdī ed-Dâliyeh (American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974), plate 102

Muhammad ed-Dhib was among the Bedouin who worked for the excavators, as Lapp describes in the summary of work undertaken in the caves at Wadi ed-Daliyeh in 1963:

“A word must be said about the unbelievable Ta‘amireh who worked for us. Their strength was amazing. They worked at least twice as hard as any workmen I have ever seen on any previous dig. From the first day we could see that their working code disgraced any slacker, and the lack of a foreman to curb their fiercely independent spirits was a distinct advantage. They scrambled up rocky slopes in less than two minutes like goats, when it took the best of us fifteen minutes of cautious climbing to do the same. There were no misgivings on the part of our best men when faced with the task of carrying out heavy pots a meter high and nearly as wide to the car five kilometers away. One of these was the famous Muhammed edh-Dhib Hassan, who began the search for manuscripts by throwing a stone into Qumran Cave I in 1947 (and thus contributed indirectly to the discovery of the Samaria Papyri).”

It is interesting that the finder of the first scrolls is identified as “Muhammed edh-Dhib Hassan.” This is also how Frank Cross identified him in his report, “The Discovery of the Samaria Papyri,” Biblical Archaeologist 26.4 (1963) 109-121, at 114, note 4. In The Untold Story of Qumran, Trever gave his name as “Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, whose nickname is ‘Edh-Dhib’.” Trever also followed up on Cross’s version version of the name: “As a result of the addition of ‘Hassan’ to Edh-Dhib’s name in reports from Jerusalem during 1963 (e.g., BA XXVl:4 [December, 1963], p. 114, n. 4), I asked Mr. Kiraz to check Muhammed’s identity card. On July 21, 1964, Kiraz visited him at his camp near el-‘Azariyeh (Bethany) and examined the card, which is numbered 5941/218342 and dated in Bethlehem on October 23, 1956. There his name is clearly given as transliterated here” (Trever, The Untold Story, p. 195, note 9).

If others are aware of additional photographs of Muhammad ed Dhib, I would be happy to learn about them!

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Photos from the 1950 Duke Exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Posted on July 22, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

Thanks to Alexander Schick for pointing out the digitization of photos in the Duke University Archives related to the exhibition at Duke of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were in the possession of Mar Samuel in 1950. There are some excellent photos in this collection:

I’m also reminded of the film footage of William Brownlee and John Trever with the scrolls in Jerusalem in the very early days after the discovery of the first scrolls. Again, thanks to Alexander Schick for pointing out this footage in a YouTube talk by Orit Rosengarten. The archival footage begins at 14:31:

Posted in Dead Sea Scrolls | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Photos of the First Finders of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Posted on July 21, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

In my last post I unpacked the story of what seems to be the earliest published photograph of the alleged finders of the first Dead Sea Scrolls:

“The Bible’s Oldest Texts,” Picture Post, vol. 60, no. 6, 8 August 1953 (p. 32)

This picture was taken in 1951 by Richmond Brown, and published (I think) for the first time in this 1953 Picture Post article. This picture is part of the photo archive of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. The Picture Post simply calls the men in the picture “two shepherds.” In the photographic catalog of the École biblique, one of the men is identified as the person who is said to have first discovered the cave, Muhammad ed Dhib:

J.-B. Humbert and A. Chambon, Fouilles de Khirbet Qumrân et de Aïn Feshkha I (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), p. 204

But from this caption, it’s not clear which person is Muhammed ed Dhib. Another version of this image appears in an exhibition catalog produced by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. It offers a more detailed caption:

Gary & Stephanie Loveless Present Dead Sea Scrolls & the Bible: Ancient Artifacts, Timeless Treasures (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2012), p. 70

Alongside the photo is the description, “Featured here are two of the men responsible for this great discovery, Muhammed ‘ed-Dib (the wolf)’ Ahmad el-Hamid and Jum’a Muhammed Khalil.” Another name is added, but it’s not clear which person is which. I do not know where the anonymous author found this extra information, and I cannot confirm or disconfirm its accuracy.

But we can compare this image to other images. A second photo was published a couple years after the Picture Post article. This picture is in Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York Viking Press, 1955):

Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking Press, 1955), Plate I

Permission to reproduce the photo is credited to William L. Reed, director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. As far as I can see, there is no information about the date when this picture was taken. Reed was a participant in the expedition to locate manuscript caves in 1952, so that is a likely timeframe for this photograph. The man on the right in this image is identified as Muhammad ed Dhib, and he appears to be the same man as the man on the right in the École biblique image (based on the clothing), but the man on the left seems to me to be a different person from the one on the left in the École biblique image.

Perhaps the most frequently reproduced photo of the alleged discoverer(s) is the one below, here as it appears in Weston Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History (2009):

Weston Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History Volume 1, 1947-1960 (Brill, 2009), p. 25.

The date given in Fields (“about 1950”), seems to be incorrect. To the best of my knowledge, the earliest form of the photo was published by John Trever in The Untold Story of Qumran (1965):

John C. Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran (Revell, 1965), p. 104

So, the caption dates the photograph not to 1950 but to 1962. And in this cropping, we see that the picture also included the two men who had conducted an interview with these Bedouin. Trever credits the photo as “courtesy Anton Kiraz.” This makes me wonder if this date is also not quite right. For Trever seems to have received this photograph in a letter from Kiraz that was sent 10 December 1961. The letter contains what seems to be a description of this picture:

“Enclosed you will find a photo of the Bedouins Muhammad ed Deeb and Jum’a when they came to my home for the tape recording. The man beside me is Jum’a Muham[m]ad and the other one standing near Mr. Docmac is Muham[m]ad ed Deeb. The photo was taken on the roof of my home after lunch. You also find enclosed an approximate bill of the expenses.”1

I’m fairly sure I recognize Anton Kiraz on the far left. So, the figures in the picture are identified as (left to right): Anton Kiraz, Jum’a Muhammad, Muhammad ed Dhib, and Judeh Docmac (the headmaster of the Lutheran School in Bethlehem, who helped with the interview).

The results of this interview and other interviews with these men form the backbone of Trever’s account of the discovery of the first scrolls. Yet, as Trever notes, the stories they told in 1961 and 1962 “seemed irreconcilable at several points with the first accounts given in 1949 and 1952. The earlier accounts had also been based on direct contacts with the same Bedouins and had the advantage of being nearer the actual events.”2

But comparing the École biblique photo and the Reed photo on the one hand with Trever’s photo on the other, I’m not sure it’s absolutely clear that these are in fact “the same Bedouins.”

I’m not aware of other early photos of the people said to be involved in the discovery of the Cave 1Q scrolls, but I would be happy to be informed if anyone knows of any.

  1. George A. Kiraz (ed.), Anton Kiraz’s Dead Sea Scroll Archive (Gorgias Press, 2005), 88-90, quotation at 90. ↩︎
  2. John C. Trever, The Untold Story of Qumran (Revell, 1965), 171. ↩︎
Posted in Dead Sea Scrolls, Find Stories | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

The Earliest Photo of the Man Who Discovered the First Dead Sea Scrolls?

Posted on July 19, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

When I was looking into the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls that are said to have been found in Cave 1Q a few years ago, I became interested in the early surviving videos and photographs of the scrolls and the excavators.

I recently came across an article in a popular magazine that I had missed until now. It’s a short piece by Gerald Lankester Harding that ran in Picture Post in August 1953. As the name of the magazine implies, the article is well illustrated with a series of photographs, for which the credit is given to Ronald Startup, a freelance photographer.

This 1953 photo shoot covers both the excavations at Qumran and the early work of sorting the fragments. I was surprised to see a photo of the “two shepherds” who are said to have been the first to find scrolls standing outside the entrance to Cave 1Q.

“The Bible’s Oldest Texts,” Picture Post, vol. 60, no. 6, 8 August 1953 (p. 32)

In this version of the image no identification is made beyond “these two shepherds.” When I have seen the image in other publications, one of the figures is identified as Muhammad ed-Dhib, the person usually credited with the initial discovery of the first three scrolls.1 I’m fairly sure that this 1953 publication is the earliest that I have seen this picture in print. What is odd is that when I have seen it in print elsewhere, the credit line is always the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. So, it seems that Ronald Startup, who took the rest of the photographs for this article, did not take this picture. This made me wonder who took it and when.

In the excellent 2017 article on Cave 1Q by Taylor, Mizzi, and Fidanzio, this picture appears as Figure 4, and it is given a date of 1949 in the caption.

Joan E. Taylor, Dennis Mizzi and Marcello Fidanzio, “Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and its Archaeological Assemblage, PEQ 149 (2017) 295-325, at 301.

But I don’t think this date of 1949 can be right. Cave 1Q was identified by archaeologists in late January 1949 and excavated between 15 February and 5 March 1949. As far as I know, that excavation was carried out by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities along with the École biblique and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (with the Arab Legion providing protection at the site). I don’t think there is any published reference to Bedouin teams in general or Muhammad ed-Dhib in particular being present at this cave at this time. Another story by Harding ran in the Illustrated London News on 1 October 1949. It makes no mention of identifying, much less photographing, the alleged discoverers of the first scrolls. I don’t think the identity of the alleged finders of the first scrolls were yet known to the scholars and archaeologists in 1949 (their identities were known by early 1953, when Harding mentioned “Mohammed edh Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed” by name in DJD I). [[Addendum 20 July 2024: I see that Harding did note in a 1949 article that the identity of the alleged finder of the scrolls had only just been discovered.2]]

In any event, the source given for the photo, the École biblique et archéologique française, provides both the true date of the photo and a possible explanation for the date of 1949 given in the article. The first volume of the École biblique’s Qumran excavation report is a catalog of photographs related to the excavations. This picture appears in a series of photos of Cave 1Q as Figure 419:

J.-B. Humbert and A. Chambon, Fouilles de Khirbet Qumrân et de Aïn Feshkha I (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 204

The immediately preceding photo, Figure 418, was indeed part of a series of photos that Roland de Vaux took at Cave 1Q in 1949. But Figure 419 does not belong to that series. It was part of a different set of photos taken by Richmond Brown in 1951, as indicated in the photo log (p. 407 in the excavation volume):

I assume this is the same person as “Mr. R. Richmond Brown” who took some of the infrared photos of the Cave 1Q scrolls. So that seems to answer the question of who took the photo and when.

But what was the occasion in 1951 that brought these Bedouin to Cave 1Q? During the excavations of Khirbet Qumran that began in November 1951 (and the expeditions to the caves in the area that commenced in 1952), the Bedouin played an important role. Scholars often portray the discovery of the scrolls as “archaeologists in a race against the Bedouin,” and while there is some truth in this characterization, it is also the case that de Vaux’s projects employed many Bedouin workers, including the man identified as Muhammad ed-Dhib.3 When discussing William Brownlee’s proposal about a different identification of the location of the discovery of the first scrolls, John Trever mentioned that de Vaux and Muhammad ed-Dhib had at some point been together at Cave 1Q:

“I discussed the matter with Father R. de Vaux at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, and he told of sitting with adh-Dhib on a large rock within a few feet of the entrance to Cave I and listening to his account of the discovery.”4

I wonder if this photo from 1951 is a snapshot from that meeting, and I wonder if the 1953 Picture Post publication of this photo really is the first published image of Muhammad ed-Dhib.

Looking more closely at this photo also raises some questions for me about other photos of the alleged discoverer of the first scrolls. But that will wait for another post.

  1. Trever identifies the full name of this person as “Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed, whose nickname is ‘Edh-Dhib’ ” (Trever, The Untold Story, 103). Frank Cross called him “Muḥammed edh-Dhîb Ḥassan” (Frank M. Cross, “The Discovery of the Samaria Papyri,” BA 26 [1963] 109–21, at 114 n. 4) ↩︎
  2. Harding wrote, “Up to the time of writing the original finder, who must be a goatherd, has not been located,” but in a footnote added before the article went to press, Harding reported the following: “Since writing this, Mr. Saad, Secretary of the Palestine Museum, has had an interview with the goatherd.” See Gerald Lankester Harding, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 81 (1949) 112-116, at 112. ↩︎
  3. Roland de Vaux, “Les manuscrits de Qumrân et l’archéologie,” RB 66 (1959) 87-110, at 89. ↩︎
  4. John C. Trever, “When was Qumrân Cave I Discovered?” Revue de Qumrân 3 (1961) 135-141, at 140. ↩︎
Posted in Dead Sea Scrolls | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Correction and a Codicological Mystery in P.Bodmer 13

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

I only recently learned of the death, about a year ago now, of Stuart G. Hall (1928-2023). It sent me back to an article that we wrote together. In 2015, I stumbled across grainy black and white photographs of what up until then had been a “lost” leaf of a papyrus codex containing the beginning of the Peri pascha of Melito of Sardis. The leaf was part of the “Bodmer Composite Codex,” and I was (and am) very interested in the construction of this book. I thought it best to publish the piece, but not being an expert in Melito, I contacted Stuart, who was 87 at the time. He jumped at the chance to revisit his earlier work on Melito, and the two of us published an article on the piece.1

The best available images of the codex can be found on the Bodmer Lab website. For the sake of clarity in the following discussion, I post images of the front and back of the “lost” leaf below.

I was responsible for the codicological section of that article, and in revisiting it, I see that I made a substantial mistake. I take the opportunity now to correct it. Below is a diagram of the quire in question and my summary of the problem in the article:

Page ⲅ (3) of Melito begins a new quire, a complete quaternion, which is followed by another complete quaternion. Thus, the first leaf of the text of Melito (pages ⲁ and ⲃ) cannot belong in a quire with the leaves that follow it. By tracing continuity of papyrus fibres across leaves, it can be shown that leaf ⲝⲇ/ⲝⲉ and leaf ⲝϛ/ⲝⲍ form a bifolium. Since the ‘inside’ of this bifolium contains consecutive pages (ⲝⲉ and ⲝϛ), it can be presumed to be the centre of a quire. Continuous fibres also show that leaf ⲝⲃ/ⲝⲅ and the leaf consisting of page ⲝⲏ and the unnumbered title page of Melito also form a bifolium. Thus, we are almost certainly dealing with a quaternion. The question is: how does the first leaf of the text of Melito fit in? Because of damage to its edges, it is not clear whether it forms a bifolium with the first or second leaf of the quire. Also adding to the difficulty is the fact that we have a total of only seven leaves (14 pages). Thus, as Turner noted in 1977, if this quire is a normal quaternion, an additional leaf (two pages) must be missing. Turner speculated that the ‘two pages could have been left empty or held a short Psalm’. 2Yet, given that the structure of the two central sheets of the quire is clear, there are only two possible positions for the missing leaf. It would need to have been located either between the title page of Melito and the first page of the text or between the first and second leaves of the text of Melito (i.e. between pages ⲃ and ⲅ of Melito). Neither option is appealing.

Given that state of affairs, I proposed that perhaps instead of an additional leaf, we may have had just a stub in one of those two positions, as illustrated in this graphic:

The problem is this: When I subsequently gained access to better images of most of the rest of this codex, I recognized that the bifolia of this codex were cut from the roll not according to how wide the bifolia should be but rather according to how tall they should be, as illustrated below:

Model of papyrus roll being cut into bifolia for a square-format codex by intended height of the bifolium

The give-away is the presence of horizontal rather than vertical kolleseis (sheet joins) that run across the full length of the bifolium. All the bifolia for this codex seem to have been cut in this way. Bifolia cut in this way will all have an equal length (the height of the roll). There will be no stubs. As a result, my suggestion that perhaps quire 5 contained a stub rather than a full sheet is simply not possible. To have stubs in a square-format codex of about the height of the Composite Codex (about 15.5 cm), you would need to be cutting the bifolia to the desired width rather than height. You probably need to have either a roll that was not very tall or a more standard roll that was cut both vertically and horizontally as illustrated below:

Model of papyrus roll being cut into bifolia for a square-format codex by intended width of the bifolium

In such a case, we would see vertical kolleseis, but I have not spotted any of these in the Composite Codex.3 This means that we are again faced with the problem of explaining the quire construction. It seems that a folium intervened either between the title page of Melito and the first page of the text or between pages 2 and 3. Neither of these locations really makes sense in terms of the contents of the codex.

So what is the solution? I’m not sure. There seems to be some imprinting of the text of page ⲁ of Melito on the title page, so those two folia were probably pressed against each other at some stage, but a blank folium between pages 2 and 3 of Melito seems very odd. As I said, it’s a bit of a mystery. Suggestions welcome.

  1. For Hall’s earlier work, see Stuart George Hall, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), reprinted with corrections 2013. For the changes to the 1979 edition, see Stuart George Hall, “Melito Peri Pascha: Corrections and Revisions,” Journal of Theological Studies 64 (2013) 105-10. For the edition of the extra Bodmer leaf, see Brent Nongbri and Stuart G. Hall, “Melito’s Peri pascha 1-5 as Recovered from a ‘Lost’ Leaf of Papyrus Bodmer XIII,” Journal of Theological Studies 68 (2017), 576-592. The edition of the text of the papyrus in that article was much improved by the suggestions of Ben Henry. ↩︎
  2. Eric G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 80. ↩︎
  3. I thought I had identified vertical kolleseis on several folia, like this one, but I am now convinced these are simply creases (the bottom of the folium in the link above seems to make this clear). ↩︎
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