THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

discovered that he was looking at a scroll of Isaiah, and that, as far as he was able to tell, it was genuinely very old. He asked permission to photograph the scroll and, after some negotiations, did so. As he worked, he became more and more excited; if it was as old as a favorable comparison with a photograph of a pre-Christian Hebrew papyrus fragment indicated, then he was handling the oldest manuscript of the Bible ever known. It was only with great difficulty that Trever could restrain his impatience when, halfway through the photography, he had to fulfill a long-standing engagement with the Curator of the Palestine Museum, then Mr. Harry Iliffe, to go to Jericho and take photographs of a local excavation. But if any mention of the discovery was made at the time to the authorities responsible for the control of antiquities in Palestine, little attention seems to have been paid to the story. Nothing was done to organize adequate, immediate steps to safeguard the treasures and seal the cave until a properly equipped expedition could probe its secrets. Trever urged the Metropolitan to take the documents out of the city, since the situation was fast deteriorating and war was beginning to stalk the streets and hills of that unhappy land. The archaeologists themselves were obliged to leave Jerusalem, and it was not until November 1948, when the April copies of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research reached Jerusalem, that Mr. G. Lankester Harding—newly responsible for the archaeological interests of Arab Palestine as well as Trans-Jordan—learned that a fabulous discovery had been made by the Dead Sea eighteen months prior. By now, photographs of the scrolls had been examined by competent paleographers like Professor W. F. Albright and pronounced definitely pre-Christian, likely dating to the first or second centuries before our era. Excitement ran high all over the scholarly world, and in Jordan, Harding was now faced with an extremely difficult and urgent problem. The source of these scrolls had to be found, and if any related archaeological material remained, it had to be expertly examined at the