On Qumran

Khirbet Qumran (in Hebrew just Qumran; khirbet in Arabic means ruins — in Turkish we have the word 'harabe', from the same root) is surely one of the most discussed places in the Middle East, because it was there, more than seventy years ago, that one of the scrolls we call the 'Dead Sea Scrolls' was found for the first time. This place has played a great part in people's imagination as general culture: many articles were written, many documentary and sometimes sensational films were made, interesting a wide public, and it is always visited by many tourists.

The place is quite small, situated on the north-west of the Dead Sea.

It is very close to the caves where the Dead Sea texts were discovered. The texts were written in Hebrew, in Aramaic or in Greek. From the archaeological investigation of the ruins, Qumran seems to have been a military centre in the time of the Hasmoneans, a centre that collapsed in the earthquake of the year 31 BCE according to Flavius Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the same period.

Another thing that makes us think this centre could not have been a centre of the Essenes is that many things belonging to women were found, knowing that the Essenes drove women out of their lives. In the cemetery of 1,200 tombs, at least 300 were tombs of women.

This centre, which the Arabs today call Qumran, seems to be the city called 'Ir ha-Melah', 'the City of Salt', in the book of Joshua. On the other hand the archaeologists Amir Drori and Yitzhak Magen showed us that these ruins must belong to a military camp just like Masada. This fortress was built at a point where the routes of trade and military activity meet. For these archaeologists the ruins were formed either because of a military attack or because of the earthquake of the year 31 BCE mentioned by the famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Apart from the ovens and the water cisterns that were found, they also found a great many coins of that period. The very large number of coins leads us to understand that the place was a commercial or industrial centre rather than a community centre like that of the Essenes. According to the archaeologists, the site fell after the year 70 CE, that is, after the fall of Jerusalem. With all this we cannot forget that the Essenes too lived in the same place and left traces of their lives. What we do not know very well is the size of the population that lived there in that era.