Scotch Tape: Bane of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Back in the day, technology and discovery were much different. And who knew, that, exactly? A lot of people, apparently, because it took a lot of people to put together the lovely exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego.

I know I was impressed.

Now, as it happens, Bedouins, who were not exactly what we Americans would call “enfranchised” at the time, first discovered the scrolls. Lingering prejudice is evident in the rhetorical stance of the captioning of the story of the scrolls’ discovery. They present a picture of the man who “probably” discovered the scrolls, an undercutting of first-person narrative that does not occur again in the exhibit. In fact, the Bedouins were forced to smuggle the scrolls in bits and pieces in match boxes and cigar tins in order to vend them… Hmmm… I’m thinking that Karl Marx, had he been alive at the time, would have had something to say about this. Luckily, I’m not that well versed in his ideology, so I can move on to my main point, which is:

I found it odd that Bedouins are somehow less reliable than the scholars who put SCOTCH TAPE on the Dead Sea Scrolls and ruined some of them forever.

Yes, that’s right. Scotch tape ruined the Dead Sea Scrolls. And what, you may ask, possessed them to do such a thing? Well, let's consider that the development of cellophane sticky tape was a marvel of epic proportions, rivaling that of presliced bread, penicillin, and the biro. Yes, once upon a time, scotch tape was cutting-edge technology, so what could be easier? And apparently, no one thought to ask any archivists (experts trained specifically to preserve old documents made out of parchment, like the Dead Sea Scrolls) how to handle these rarest of all archival documents. I mean, why ask an expert when you have sticky tape and some language scholars who don’t know that much about the physical properties of parchment? As a scholar with a bit of the sticky tape fetish (I own at least a dozen rolls, personally, maybe more), even I find this state of affairs quite appalling. It would be like putting rare documents together with extra-sticky post-it notes and crazy glue.

Of course, decades after the scotch tape was applied, as researchers were, literally, weeping as they watched the scrolls dissolve into piles of goo or shrivel into dust before their eyes, experts questioned the wisdom of the tape route. Oopsies.

Today, what remains of the scrolls, having been salvaged by actual, trained archivists, is appropriately mounted on scotch-tape free, acid-free paper, and stored under conditions that will actually prevent their decay. What I find a bit distressing is that the archivists of yesteryear would probably have done a similarly good job had they been asked.