Buried Treasure

In all the mystery and marvel of the 2,000-year-old scrolls found nine years ago in caves near the ruins of a religious community on the Dead Sea, two scrolls shone with a special aura. For these, instead of leather or parchment, were of copper--a precious metal in those ancient times, betokening a message of highest value. Oxidized by time, the copper scrolls stubbornly withheld their secret while scientists puttered and pondered over the problem of unrolling them without crumbling them to powder.

Imaginations, scholarly and unscholarly, danced to the possibilities hidden in the copper scrolls. When British Philologist John Allegro discoursed with tantalizing assurance of parallels between the scrolls'

Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus Christ (TIME, April 2), scroll snobs reminded one another that Allegro, though his surmises seemed wild, had been one of the few to study the copper scrolls when they were opened (by coating them with plastic and slitting them into strips). Perhaps, they whispered, his high-wire speculations would prove to be sound after all.

Last week the secret of the copper scrolls came out. Their subject, announced the French, British and U.S. scholars who have been working on them in the Jordanian section of Jerusalem, was not spiritual at all. They were clues to buried treasure--and on a Fort Knox scale. Two hundred tons of gold and silver-were mentioned as well as a considerable cache of incense in about 60 separate hoards scattered over a 50-mile-long area from Hebron to Mount Gerizim, near Nablus.

The copper rolls were originally one sheet, rolled up in a hurry or by unskilled hands which broke it at a joint into two rolls. The directions read more like the works of Captain Kidd than the Dead Sea Scrolls' Teacher of Righteousness: "In the cistern which is below the rampart, on the east side, in a place hollowed out of rock; 600 bars of silver . . . Close by, below the southern corner of the portico at Zadok's tomb, and underneath the pilaster in the exedras, a vessel of incense in pine wood and a vessel of incense in cassia wood ... In the pit near by, towards the north, near the grave, in a hole opening to the north, there is a copy of this book with explanations, measurements and all details."

No one knows where Zadok's tomb might be, and all explanations, measurements, and other details await the finding of "this book," whatever and wherever it is. Experts, accustomed to Middle Eastern tall tales of buried treasure, are skeptical of the troves' existence--especially since the quantity is so huge. But this is not likely to keep scholars from speculating as to what an otherworldly sect of ascetics like the Essenes might be doing with such a hoard. Nor is it likely to keep treasure seekers from getting out picks and shovels and starting to dig.

-At present prices: $204 million if all gold, $5,320,000 if all silver.

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