Meanwhile, the archaeologists had entered the scene. In 1949 a bored Belgian member of the United Nations Observer Corps persuaded the Jordanian Arab

Legion to look for the cave of the Scrolls. They found the hole in the cliff and the French Dominican Roland de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique of Jerusalem, collected from its floor hundreds of manuscript fragments, some of which belonged to the Scrolls that the Arab shepherd had removed from there two years earlier. Between 1951 and 1956, ten further caves containing five more scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments were discovered, mostly by clandestine Arab treasure hunters. The fragments, some large, some small, originally belonged to 900 scrolls, about one quarter of them biblical. They were written mostly on leather, 15 per cent on papyrus, a few on potsherds and one on copper sheets. The texts are chiefly in Hebrew with some Aramaic and a handful of Greek manuscripts. With the help of palaeography, carbon 14 analysis, archaeological data and, when possible, the examination of their content, the texts are dated from the end of the third century BC to the first century AD.

The work of the archaeologists was not exhausted by the 11 manuscript caves. Having first ignored the nearby ruins, known as Qumran, in the mistaken belief that they were the remains of a fourth-century Roman fortlet, Roland de Vaux and his colleagues set out to excavate this ancient settlement as well as a nearby farm further south at Ein Feshkha. The ruins lie within a stone's throw from Cave 4, which yielded nearly two-thirds of the Qumran fragments. De Vaux concluded that the main period of occupation of the site fell between the late second century BC and its destruction by the Romans in AD 68; that the communal character of the establishment was indicated by a large assembly hall and dining room and over a thousand pots, bowls, plates, etc; that the adjacent cemetery of some 1,200 graves contained mostly male skeletons (but only five per cent of the tombs have been examined); and that numerous reservoirs, several furnished with steps, served for ritual purification. The site revealed also a manuscript workshop with inkwells and a potters' installation. Hence, de Vaux's surmise that Qumran was a religious settlement and that its occupiers were members of the Jewish sect of the Essenes. The first-century AD Jewish writers Philo and Flavius Josephus report their daily purificatory baths, male celibacy and religious communism and their Roman contemporary, Pliny the Elder, places the Essenes to the western shore of the Dead Sea, between Jericho and Ein Gedi. The Essene theory adopted by de Vaux - it was already guessed in 1948 by Eleazar Sukenik and strongly argued by the French scholar André Dupont-Sommer - quickly gained general acceptance, although during the last 30 years it has been contested, in my opinion largely on questionable grounds.