UNRAVELLING THE THREADS OF HISTORY textiles from Qumran This detective story is still unfolding. A multi-national, multidisciplinary research team at Daresbury Laboratory and the European Synchrotron Radiation Source in Grenoble is using state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation instrumentation to study a few tiny pieces of textiles found in the caves of Qumran. This is where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 and where an eclectic religious sect, the Essenes, are reported to have lived. The aim is to find out the type of fibres and the nature of the pigments some of the textiles were dyed with and relate this information to the archaeological questions surrounding the mysterious Essenes. Figure 1. Caves in the vicinity of Khirbet Qumran. Most of what is known about the Essenes has come from ancient writings. The first century AD historians, Pliny the Elder, Philo and Josephus, certainly mention their presence in Qumran and comment on the political and religious setting at a time of momentous importance for Judaism and Christianity. Pliny says in his Natural History, written in AD74: "On the west side of the Dead Sea, but out of range of the noxious exhalations of the coast, is the solitary tribe of the Essenes, which is remarkable beyond all other tribes in the whole world, as it has renounced all sexual desire, has no money, and has only palm-trees for company. Day by day the throng of refugees is recruited to an equal number by numerous accessions of persons tired of life and driven thither by the wave of fortune to adopt their manners. Thus through thousands of ages... a race in which no one is born lives on
forever: so prolific for their advantage is other men's weariness of life". From Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran, Norman Golb, 1995. The Essenes seem to have turned their backs on the religious hierarchy to pursue purity, chastity and messianic teaching. They followed their faith to minute details of observance, which may have included an aversion to clothes made from animal fibre or dyed with animal dyes. Intense scholarly controversy and hot debate has ensued following the early discoveries. Were they the sole inhabitants of the caves? Was it the Essenes that hid the scrolls fearing the imminent arrival of the Roman 10th legion after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70? Did they resist or did they flee? Why were they in this desolate place in the first place and since when? Did they foretell the arrival of Jesus? What can we learn about them from the scarce material remains? What materials did they use for their textiles and did the Essenes use indigo as a dye? If so, what was its source? Figure 2. Two of the textile fragments diagnosed as linen and cotton, respectively. Two threads of the linen fragment are dyed blue. Is this indigo? The Bible prescribes tekhelet as the pigment to use for the traditional thin blue stripes of the prayer shawl. Indigo can be extracted from several natural sources. It was in common use throughout much of the ancient world, much valued by Minoan and Mycenean kings and Asyrian, Persian, Roman and Byzantine emperors. The Phoenicians made a name for themselves out of indigo (purple dyers!) and were the masters of its production and its trade, in the Mediterranean, for more than a millennium. They extracted it from the shell of murex sea snails. In India and northern Europe, plants such as Indigofera tinctoria (indigo) and Ivatis tinctoria (woad) provided the source until the mid-19th century when aniline dyes largely superseded it. The first step was to examine tiny threads of the textiles with optical and electron microscopy. Linen, (Linum usitatissimum L.) wool and cotton were identified. Flax was spun left-handed and cotton, right-handed, these are important details for textile archaeologists. Most of the flax fibres are cleanly separated and of cylindrical cross- section, but in two samples the cross-
section is rather unusually polygonal, with fibres still adhering together in parallel bundles. Figure 3. Electron micrograph of one of the linen textile fragments. Figure 4. Diffraction patterns obtained from the linen fragment shown in Figure 2. The next step was to shoot X-rays through the tiny samples, nondestructively, at station 9.6 of the SRS. The resulting fibre diffraction patterns upheld the microscopy diagnosis. They were characteristic of cellulose (flax/cotton) or keratin (wool). The diffraction pattern of micro-particles attached to the fabric were recorded simultaneously, in just 10 seconds. Single fibrils (10-20 micrometres thin) extracted with great skill from flax and cotton threads were then examined by micro-diffraction at the micro-focus beamline ID13 at ESRF where the beam footprint can be as small as 2
micrometres. These measurements allowed the accurate measurement of the crystalline parameters of the helically-wound macromolecules in their repeating crystalline motif. Even the cellulose microfibril angle could be determined with high accuracy. It was also possible to shoot at individual crystalline particles attached to the fibre to determine the nature of the diffracting minerals. Some of the flax samples indicate a rather large crystal lattice. Is it possible to use these measurements to determine where the plants originated from or how they were processed? This will require standards, ancient and modern, with which to compare. This work is far from complete, but we do know for certain that two of the samples examined are definitely cotton. This is rather intriguing, as cotton was not supposed to have been introduced in Palestine at the time. As for the dyes, more detailed work is needed. The thrill of this particular detective story is not over yet.
Figure 5. A textile fragment and the X-ray diffraction pattern from the green particles attached to it. The multi-national team is led by Dr Jan Gunneweg from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and consists of team members from Kiel University in Germany, ESRF, Stirling University and Daresbury Laboratory. Researchers from Israel, Hungary, France and Holland are looking at other aspects of the same story. The results will be published in QUMRAN vol 2.