A mysterious metal scroll discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls more than seven decades ago has sparked a bold new theory connecting it to one of the most turbulent and bloody chapters inancient Jewish history.

Every other scroll in the collection was inscribed on parchment or papyrus, its contentsdrawn from scriptureor religious tradition. The Copper Scroll broke every convention: hammered into metal sheets and, by all appearances, created with no intention of ever being read again.

Some researchers believe it once documented sacred wealth belonging to a priestly sect that was convinced it was living through the biblical "End of Days," on the eve of an apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil.

The Copper Scroll was unearthed in 1952 inside Cave 3Q, near the ancient settlement of Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Researchers recognised immediately that it bore no resemblance to any other scroll in the collection.

Where the broader archive contained scripture, religious commentary and apocalyptic writings, the Copper Scroll offered something far stranger: a cryptic inventory of buried gold and silver hidden at locations across the ancient Holy Land, described through vague references to tombs, cisterns, stairways and buried containers.

The scroll contains 64 such entries, the majority impossible to verify. Translator Józef Tadeusz Milik rendered one as: "At Khorrebeh, situated in the valley of Achor below the steps leading to the east, [dig] forty cubits: a coffer [full] of money, the sum of which is the weight of seventeen talents." Another reads: "In the funerary monument of Ben Rabbah, of Beit Shalisha: 100 ingots of gold."

Generations of treasure hunters and academics have gone looking, and come away empty-handed every time.

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For many years, the dominant theory held that the scroll recorded treasure hidden before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 AD, reports the Daily Mail. Some scholars went further, suggesting the entries could point to missing Temple treasures that escaped Roman plunder, among them the sacred menorah, which the Romans famously carried off and later immortalised in relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome.

Source: Daily Express :: World Feed