The Copper Scroll
All the mystery and excitement of an Indiana Jones film can be found in the story surrounding the Copper Scroll of Qumran. Discovered by an Arab Bedouin in March of 1952, the Copper Scroll was found in what is now known as Cave 3 in Qumran, among the remnants of an early community of Jewish zealots—the Essenes.
Alone among the Dead Sea collection, the Copper Scroll was unique in its material, language and content. It was, of course, made of copper, with traces of arsenic and iron marking it as originating from one of several early Egyptian mines. Its script is unintelligible in parts, though it does contain early Mishnaic Hebrew, many unknown words and phrases, and cryptic Greek letters interspersed throughout the document. Best of all for adventurers, the Copper Scroll contains a list of sixty-four buried treasures. Sadly, there is no map.
The treasures of the Copper Scroll excited its discoverers, the Dominican priests and secular archeologists of the Ecole Biblique of Jerusalem, who assumed responsibility for all work and interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the singular oddity of the Copper Scroll. Despite soon dismissing the treasures of the Copper Scroll as a hoax, the legend of its treasures attracted a contentious piracy of treasure hunters, archaeologists, and a scramble of misfits. This included an unholy clutch of desert Bedouins, an Assyrian Christian cobbler, a Coptic cleric, various cave-robbers and shard-sharps, antiquities dealers, Dominican Catholic priests, an orthodox archbishop, an atheist, a Baptist minister from Texas, and, finally, the Jordanian and Israeli governments. Despite all the interest, no verifiable treasure of the Copper Scroll has ever been uncovered.
Though the treasures of the Copper Scroll have long been assumed to have been those of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, a small group of heretics, among them Freud, Osman and Feather, have concluded that the Copper Scroll can be traced to Ancient Egypt; and that the scroll itself shares a connection with the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten. The Copper Scroll, if these renegade scholars are to be believed, is a record of the location of the remaining riches of the monotheistic Atenic priests of Akhenaten and may, possibly, be mixed with the wealth of the Prince of Egypt, Moses.
Most exciting as a premise for The Amen Heresy it appears that there is a duplicate Copper Scroll, item 64 on the scroll’s treasure list, which purports to contain “a copy of this document (the Copper Scroll) , with an explanation and their measurements, and an inventory of each thing and other things.” While the Copper Scroll may still hold its secrets, there is yet opportunity for more marvels to unfold.