The Copper Scroll Caches

The account

In 1952 archaeologists clearing a cave above the Dead Sea found a scroll that did not belong with the others. The famous Dead Sea Scrolls are parchment and papyrus, fragile words about God and the end of days. This one was beaten from three sheets of almost pure copper, engraved with a chisel to last forever, and what it held was not scripture at all. It was a list. Sixty four places, each with a curt set of directions, and at each one, buried gold and silver, tons of it.

Read it and you can feel the maddening precision of a man hiding a fortune in a hurry. In the cistern that is below the rampart, on the east side, dig forty cubits: a vault of silver. Under the steps of the eastern gate, a chest. The amounts are staggering, far more than any band of monks could own, which is why most scholars think the Copper Scroll is an inventory of the treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem, hidden away in the desert before the Romans burned the city in the year 70.

In 1962 a scholar named John Allegro took the scroll into the field and dug the most promising sites one by one. He found nothing. Everyone since has found nothing.

Here is why it may be the cruelest treasure map ever made. It survived perfectly, engraved in metal to outlast empires, and it is completely public, translated, photographed, studied for seventy years. It names sixty four caches of temple gold in plain language. And not one has ever been found, because every landmark it points to, the gate, the cistern, the tomb, the aqueduct, crumbled to dust two thousand years ago. The map outlived the world it mapped, and now it points at sixty four places that are no longer there.

Known intelligence

• Found in 1952 in a Qumran cave, the Copper Scroll is engraved on nearly pure copper, unlike the parchment Dead Sea Scrolls.
• It is not scripture but a list of 64 locations where tons of gold and silver were said to be hidden.
• Many scholars believe it records the treasure of the Jerusalem Temple, hidden before the Roman sack of 70 AD.
• John Allegro's 1962 expedition dug the likeliest sites and found nothing; no cache has ever been recovered.

Theories of the hunt

• A genuine record of Temple treasure whose landmarks are now lost to time.
• A work of legend or fiction describing a treasure that never existed.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The scroll lists 64 caches keyed to landmarks, gates, cisterns, tombs, and aqueducts, in the Judean wilderness, most near Jericho, but every landmark is roughly 2,000 years gone.
• John Allegro's 1962 dig of the likeliest sites found nothing; his site list is the starting map for anyone retrying with modern survey.
• The scroll is in the Jordan Museum in Amman, and the West Semitic Research Project's high-resolution scans are the basis for any fresh translation, where unit and place-name ambiguities still hide.
• If the treasure is the Second Temple's, it was hidden just before 70 AD, so the real lead is matching the scroll's places to first-century topography, not the modern landscape.

The trail, in order

• 1st century AD: the scroll is engraved, perhaps as the Temple is threatened.
• 70 AD: Rome sacks Jerusalem and destroys the Second Temple.
• 1952: the Copper Scroll is found in a cave at Qumran.
• 1962: John Allegro's dig finds none of the listed caches.

Sources and the record

• Copper Scroll (Wikipedia)
• Dating the Copper Scroll (Biblical Archaeology Society)