DSS Catalogue Now Available

Over the last 45 years, scholars have had to rediscover the Dead Sea Scrolls hundreds of times—almost every time they tried to find a particular fragment among the thousands stored between glass plates in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Some scholars have reported that the search sometimes took several days. But the recent publication of a preliminary catalogue of the scrolls may now put an end—at least in part—to such time-wasting searches.

After three years of data-gathering, the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) of Claremont, California, has completed a preliminary publication of the Dead Sea Scroll Inventory Project: Lists of Documents, Photographs and Museum Plates. The cataloguing was done by the center’s Stephen A. Reed (now an assistant professor at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe), in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority and with additional funding from the Dorot Foundation, the Annenberg Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities.