Challenging History: The Dead Sea Scrollshttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/1902099/posts?page=2
A Mysterious Metal
One of the best-kept secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been the discovery of metals in the black ink. That finding was buried in unpublished results, and wasn’t unearthed until 1996.
The presence of metals further points to the scrolls being of medieval origin.
Scientific testing of the scrolls in the early 1950s found silver, manganese, iron and other metals in the black ink used on the scrolls. Scholars tried to downplay the discovery of these metals by saying that some of them, like copper and lead, were byproducts of leaching from a bronze inkwell. Yet silver, manganese and iron are not components in the making of bronze. The 1990s tests also detected the presence of strontium and titanium but could not tell if they were pure. (In its purest form, neither element was isolated until the 1800s.)
The presence of metals also contradicts the scholarly claim that the authors of the scrolls used Dead Sea water for ink, for the salty water contains no titanium, according to a chart of a scientific study from an Ivy League physicist. Scholars tell us that ink spiked with metals came after the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Others tests revealed that cinnabar, a metal, was the prime element used in much of the red ink. Yet in biblical times, cinnabar was extremely expensive. Only King Herod himself could afford it for use as paint - and the authors of the scrolls called themselves “the poor” (a Christian term).
Cinnabar was not commonly used for ink in the Middle East until almost 1,000 years later.
Scholars assume that the cinnabar on the scrolls came from Spain, but it was invented by the Chinese for ink. Arabs put metal in ink and probably borrowed the manufacture of cinnabar ink from the Chinese and made it very inexpensively.
Also, metals are corrosive on leather. After just 200 years, they begin to eat through the inked area. Many medieval texts with iron- or cinnabar-based ink have holes in the manuscripts where the ink was used.
But from the color photos, there are no holes in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the areas of the cinnabar red ink, which suggests the process is just starting - and pinpoints the scrolls on a much shorter timeline.
CTR