TY - GEN A1 - Rabin, Ira A2 - Wandrey, T1 - Building a bridge from the Dead Sea Scrolls T2 - Jewish Manuscript Cultures N2 - As part of the Qumran project conducted at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin between 2007 and 2010, my colleagues and I developed a new, integrated methodology for determining the original and acquired properties of highly heterogeneous Dead Sea Scrolls. The purpose of this methodology is to help scholars determine the provenance of fragments of the scrolls and sort and compare them more easily than in the past. Since our measurements allowed us to differentiate between the minerals originating from the production processes and the sediments accrued during storage in the caves in Qumran, we were able to reconstruct the treatment of hides and discovered that at least two distinct parchmentproduction techniques co-existed at the beginning of the common era. The reconstruction of workmanship on animal hides in Antiquity raised doubts about the validity of the current definition of parchment, which is based on a production technique known from the Middle Ages. We hope that our current work will also help researchers understand the characteristic properties of gewil, qelaf and dukhsustos better.ยน The evolution and socio-geographic distribution of writing inks in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages are the second focus of our investigative work at BAM. We use X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) to determine the chemical composition of inks and NIR reflectography for their typology. We are amply assisted in our ambitious enterprise by codicologists and palaeographers who have adopted our methodology and conduct field studies of their own. PB - de Gruyter CY - Berlin KW - Dead Sea Scrolls KW - Medieval Jewish manuscripts KW - Material analysis PY - 2017 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/43558 AN - OPUS4-43558 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-435582 VL - 13 SP - 309 EP - 321 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany