our adventure!

OK, the Dead Sea Scrolls. We had a great morning. The Things helped me put away all the Christmas stuff and we got the house all tidy and then we set out. Just as we arrived in Seattle it started to hail. It didn't hit till we were just around the corner from the Science Center, so that was handy. The Things and I had about 2 hours to kill before our entrance time to the Dead Sea Scrolls so we enjoyed some of the other exhibits and went to the planetarium. Thing Two was preparing for pouty mode till we got in and seated and he realized how cool it really was. I LOVE the planetarium and we got some up-to-date star maps, bousest!
So we queued up for the exhibition after an enforced potty break. After being repeatedly questioned as to whether we had left our cameras, edged weapons, incendiary devices, and fire arms at home we got audio tour thingees and waited some more. While we were inching forward feeling like cattle we realized one of the audiotour deals was dead so I had to wade through all the people BACK to the counter at the beginning,
"Scuse me, ma'am, pardon me, excuse me, could I just..., thanks, pardon me, thanks , scuse me, pardon me." Then they gave me a fully charged one and I got to push and shove BACK through the serpentine to where my children were discovering the wonders of the "Family guide audio tour." They did a great job of covering the information in an interesting way for kids without dumbing it down toooo much. They started off learning about Israel, Essenes and this dude.

The nice man on the right, with the wildass mustache, was the discoverer of the scrolls when he was a young man chasing a goat. In the time honored method of young men everywhere, he was attempting to get the creature to return to him...by throwing rocks at it. While incredibly ineffective at coaxing animals, it was just what the Dead Sea Scrolls needed to reveal themselves to an amazed world. This is where the scrolls were discovered, in caves near the ancient Essene settlement of Qumran.

There was alot of information about the area of the Dead Sea, the art and science of reconstructing and preserving the scrolls, how they determined their age, and how accurate that dating was, even before carbon 14 testing came along. The Things got to try assembling documents in a hands-on display area and they got to try piecing a fragmented pottery jar together as well. There were displays of detritus unearthed in Qumran; sandals, pots, baskets, coins, lamps, rope, bit of cloth, and pottery cups and bowls. After weaving our way through all that we finally arrived at...
some replicas of the dead sea scrolls, brightly lit for observational purposes. The replicas were interesting in their way but we were ready to head up the ramp to the real deal.
The actual scrolls were only allowed to be subjected to 24 hours of light during their entire visit to Seattle. They were kept in a very dimly lit area, temperature controlled, and after 30 seconds of light exposure, the cases went dark for about 10 seconds. After the 10 scroll displays leave here, they will fly business class back to Israel (kosher meal, please) on separate planes where they will go into a darkened vault and will remain there, with no light exposure, for at least one year.
There were ten examples of the documents, 4 of which had never been displayed to the public before. Most of them were very fagmented, like the examples shown here. But there was one very wide, almost complete scroll (missing only the bottom bit) of Psalm 119. There were six scroll displays of Torah writings, and an excerpt of The Book of War, a pseudo-Hezekiah, a commentary on a Torah book, Isaiah I think, and also a scroll that detailed community rules of the Essenes.
It was amazing. The Things were fascinated and incredibly well behaved, and it was wonderful. The fact that we could stand there, looking at the writing of humans from about two thousand years ago, awe does not begin to describe the wonder.

Here are the thoughts of the Things:
Thing Two~ " What I thought was really cool was the audioguide, it was like a cell phone and a remote combined. There were two people talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls and it was really very interesting."
Thing One~ "Overall, it was exactly what I expected. A bunch of of boring scrolls telling us about our past. The audioguide told me more than I already knew about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it got me thinking about how they lived and spoke and communicated. It helped me understand they were not that much different than people today, they were human, just like we are. Maybe future generations will find evidence of us and that we lived and died and we are not that different than they are."