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The first manuscripts from the Qumran caves were found in 1947. Within the following 10 years, clandestine and legal excavations revealed some 900 highly fragmented manuscripts from the late Second Temple period. This collection is generally known as Scrolls of the Judea Desert or Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). For many years after their discovery, text analysis and fragmeents attribution were the main concern of the scholars dealing with the scrolls. The uncertain archaeological provenance of the larger part of the collection added an additional difficulty to the formidable task of sorting some 19000 fragments. After 60 years of scholar research the question of origin, archaeological provenance and correct attribution of the fragmenst are still hotly debated. To dtermine a possible contribution to the debate from the point of view of writing materials, we used otpical and electron microscopy, various X-ray based techniques as well as vibratiional sprectroscopy. We validated our approach with SY - based studies using the advantages of the synchroton radiation source with respect to the benchtop devices. Our laboratory studies showed that often production and storage locality could be distinguished thenks to the specific residues ("fingerprint") they left on the material. Moreover, we have diescovered that diferrent parchment production processses coexisted in the antiquity, and the resulting writing materials can readily be distinguished.
Our experimental knowledge about the inks of antiquity and late antiquity rarely goes beyond their visual description. In rare cases, inks typology has been determined by means of microscopy and reflectography, i.e. using their physical and optical properties, respectively. Since carbon, plant and iron gall inks belong to different classes of compounds they could be easily distinguished had only pure inks been used. Even these crude observations suggest that the inks used differed greatly in their composition.
Reconstruction of the ink recipes with the help of advanced non-destructive analytical techniques could serve as a powerful accessory for in the studies of ancient papyri.
The proposed paper will present a short survey of the methods of material analysis and the challenges offered by ancient inks. The examples of the ink studies from the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Egyptian Museum in Berlin will conclude the paper.