Posted on 08/15/2006 5:09:35 AM PDT by Pharmboy
If it had been an aspirin factory, Bill Clinton could have blown it up...
Where did they get wood to fire their kilns?
Possibility, I guess, but it would take a lot of sheep s**t if for any "large scale" production. If the area were anything like it is today, even sheep in any numbers would have a hard time finding enough to graze on and that would have been over a very large area. Lots of long range pooper scooping.
Sounds shaky to me, but I'm no potter or archaeologist.
The reason for the pottery factory idea probably started with the pottery, which appears to have been made right on the spot. My wild guess is that the jars were used for various useful salts (table salt, and natron, whatever else is around) and perhaps shrimp (they used to thrive in the Dead Sea, not sure when that was no more) and fish out of the river. Reeeeeeeeeeeeeally salty fish. :')
The scrolls were for the most part found in jars, perchance made at this pottery factory. :')
Thanks for the info - that sheds a lot of light on it! :-)
Dear Pharmboy,
You have carefully edited the article to leave out what are, to my mind at least, the most interesting portions -- which clearly establish a link between Yizhak Magen, Yuval Peleg and Norman Golb (who, already 25 years ago, first destroyed the idea that there is a demonstrable, organic link between Qumran and the Scrolls). Here is the complete text of the article:
Dead Sea Scrolls theory faces new challenge
By John Noble Wilford The New York Times
New archaeological evidence is raising more questions about the conventional interpretation linking the desolate ruins of an ancient settlement known as Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in nearby caves in one of the sensational discoveries of the last century.
After early excavations at the site, on a promontory above the western shore of the Dead Sea, scholars concluded that members of a strict Jewish sect, the Essenes, had lived there in a monastery and presumably wrote the scrolls in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. Many of the texts describe religious practices and doctrine in ancient Israel.
But two Israeli archaeologists who have excavated the site on and off for more than 10 years now assert that Qumran had nothing to do with the Essenes or a monastery or the scrolls. It had been a pottery factory.
The archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported in a book and a related magazine article that their extensive excavations turned up pottery kilns, whole vessels, production rejects and thousands of clay fragments. Derelict water reservoirs held thick deposits of fine potters' clay.
Magen and Peleg said that, indeed, the elaborate water system at Qumran appeared to be designed to bring the clay-laced water into the site for the purposes of the pottery industry. No other site in the region has been found to have such a water system.
By the time the Romans destroyed Qumran in A.D. 68 in the Jewish revolt, the archaeologists concluded, the settlement had been a center of the pottery industry for at least a century. Before that, the site apparently was an outpost in a chain of fortresses along the Israelites' eastern frontier.
"The association between Qumran, the caves and the scrolls is, thus, a hypothesis lacking any factual archaeological basis," Magen said in an article in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. He and Peleg wrote a more detailed report of their research in "The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates," published this year.
This is by no means the first challenge to the Essene hypothesis originally advanced by Roland de Vaux, a French priest and archaeologist who was an early interpreter of the scrolls after their discovery almost 60 years ago. Other scholars have suggested that Qumran was a fortified manor house or a villa, possibly an agricultural community or a commercial entrepôt.
Norman Golb, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at the University of Chicago who is a longtime critic of the Essene link, said he was impressed by the new findings and the pottery-factory interpretation.
"Magen's a very seasoned archaeologist and scholar, and many of his views are cogent," Golb said in a telephone interview. "A pottery factory? That could well be the case."
Golb said that, of course, Qumran could have been both a monastery and a pottery factory. Yet, he added: "There is not an iota of evidence that it was a monastery. We have come to see it as a secular site, not one of pronounced religious orientation."
For years, Golb has argued that the multiplicity of Jewish religious ideas and practices recorded in the scrolls made it unlikely that they were the work of a single sect like the Essenes.
The scrolls in the caves were probably written by many different groups, Golb surmised, and were removed from Jerusalem libraries by refugees in the Roman war. Fleeing to the east, the refugees may well have deposited the scrolls for safekeeping in the many caves near Qumran.
The new research appears to support this view. As Magen noted, Qumran in those days was at a major crossroads of traffic to and from Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea.
Magen also cited documents showing that refugees in another revolt against the Romans in the next century had fled to the same caves. He said they were "the last spot they could hide the scrolls before descending to the shore" of the Dead Sea.
In the magazine article, Magen said the jars in which most of the scrolls were stored had probably come from the pottery factory. If so, this may prove to be the only established connection between the Qumran settlement and the scrolls.
P.s. there was one final paragraph in the article, which I accidentally omitted. I apologize if I created the impressiono that Pharmboy intentionally left out the paragraphs concerning Norman Golb -- he did include a link to the article, which can thus be read in its entirety by any reader of the blog. Here is the article's final paragraph:
Despite the rising tide of revisionist thinking, other scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls continue to defend the Essene hypothesis, though with some modifications and diminishing conviction. [these last two words speak more than all the rest of the article put together]
You have implied in the above sentence that I had spent time on this to edit out the most interesting parts of the article (at least to you). Perhaps being obnoxious comes naturally to you, or perhaps you had to spend time to carefully construct a first post on your first day here at FreeRepublic to be obnoxious--perhaps we'll never know. But, it is bad manners to bust into somebody else's place and begin lecturing them.
First of all, the NY Times only allows 300 words from their article and that's what I posted; what you did by posting the whole article is against the rules and places FR in legal jeopardy. Second, I edited it to reflect what I thought to be the key points in the few words I could use.
Third: learn the rules of the board before you start posting. Thanks and welcome to FreeRepublic.
Any links? thanks Mo
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