Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran from 1947 onwards, are Jewish manuscripts copied between about the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. Among them is the Great Isaiah Scroll, from around 125 BC: all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah on one scroll more than seven metres long.

Ikigai Daily

Religion & BeliefHistory

The story behind the card

The first seven scrolls were found in 1946–47 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave about 1.5 km from the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 eleven caves around Qumran had yielded pieces of 981 different manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. Many scholars link them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish group of the time, though others think they came from Jerusalem priests or other groups. Most survive only as fragments of parchment and papyrus. Copies or pieces of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified. The Isaiah scroll, 17 sheets of parchment sewn together, is the only Qumran scroll preserved almost whole, and it is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known before the discovery. It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Türkçe oku
Ölü Deniz Yazmaları, 1947'den itibaren Kumran yakınlarındaki mağaralarda bulunan ve yaklaşık MÖ 3. yüzyıl ile MS 1. yüzyıl arasında kopyalanmış Yahudi el yazmalarıdır. Aralarında MÖ 125 dolaylarından kalma Büyük Yeşaya Tomarı da var: Yeşaya Kitabı'nın 66 bölümünün tamamı, yedi metreyi aşan tek bir tomarda yer alır.

İlk yedi tomarı 1946–47'de Bedevi çobanlar, Ölü Deniz'in kuzeybatı kıyısına 1,5 km kadar uzaklıktaki bir mağarada buldu. 1956'ya kadar Kumran çevresindeki on bir mağaradan 981 ayrı el yazmasına ait parçalar çıkarıldı. Bunların çoğu İbranice, bir kısmı Aramice ve Yunancadır. Pek çok araştırmacı yazmaları dönemin sıkı kurallarla yaşayan Yahudi topluluğu Essenilerle ilişkilendirir; kimileri ise Kudüslü rahiplerden ya da başka topluluklardan geldiklerini düşünür. Yazmaların çoğu yalnızca parşömen ve papirüs parçaları olarak günümüze ulaştı. Ester dışında İbranice Kutsal Kitap'ın (Tanah) bütün kitaplarından tam nüshalar ya da parçalar bulundu. Birbirine dikilmiş 17 parşömen yaprağından oluşan Yeşaya tomarı, Kumran'dan neredeyse eksiksiz çıkan tek tomardır. Keşiften önce bilinen en eski İbranice Kutsal Kitap el yazmalarından da yaklaşık bin yıl daha eskidir. Bugün Kudüs'teki İsrail Müzesi'nin Kitabın Mabedi bölümünde korunuyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Dead Sea Scrolls
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Ragnarök is the Norse myth of the gods' last battle, when the old world is destroyed and a renewed world rises after it.

The story survives mainly in two Icelandic books of the 13th century. The Poetic Edda collects older anonymous poems, above all Völuspá, 'The Seeress's Prophecy'; the Prose Edda is a guide to the myths written around 1220 by the poet and chieftain Snorri Sturluson. In the final battle the wolf Fenrir swallows Odin, Thor kills the world serpent Jörmungandr but dies of its venom, and Loki and the watchman god Heimdall kill each other. Yet the story goes on: Odin's son Vídar avenges him, a green earth rises from the sea, and two humans, Líf and Lífthrasir, who sheltered in a wood, begin humankind again.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

At the Cadaver Synod, a church trial held in Rome in 897, Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor Formosus dug up, dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne. A deacon answered the charges for the corpse, and it was found guilty.

Formosus had been pope from 891 to 896 and had been dead for about nine months. The trial was political: Rome's noble families fought over the papacy, and Formosus had crowned a German rival of the powerful Spoleto family as emperor, while Stephen owed his position to that family. The verdict declared that Formosus had never been a lawful pope, annulled his acts, including the priests he had ordained, and cut off the three fingers of his right hand used for blessing. The body was later thrown into the Tiber. Public anger grew, and within months Stephen was deposed, imprisoned and strangled. Later popes annulled the trial and banned trials of the dead.

HistoryRead card
WonderArchitecture

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in 537 as the cathedral of Constantinople, has one of the most influential interiors in architecture. Its great dome rests on pendentives, curved triangles of masonry that let a round dome sit on a square plan, and 40 windows around its base fill it with light.

Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.

Hagia SophiaRead card
WonderArchitecture

The eleven churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia were carved out of solid volcanic rock in the Middle Ages, each shaped from the top down inside deep trenches, and they are still a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians.

Tradition credits the churches to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; archaeologists think some parts are older, and the building sequence is still debated. Legend says he meant the site as a new Jerusalem after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, and many places there carry biblical names, such as a stream called the Jordan. Masons first cut trenches to free a block of rock, then hollowed out rooms, columns, windows and doors from it; the most famous church, Bete Giyorgis, is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Tunnels link the churches, which are still in daily use. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

Rock-Hewn Churches, LalibelaRead card
WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and largely rebuilt in 836, is one of the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. Its courtyard, columned prayer hall and square minaret became a model for mosques across North Africa.

The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi chose the site when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670. The mosque was rebuilt several times, and most of what stands today dates from the reconstruction ordered by Emir Ziyadat Allah I in 836. Its prayer hall is hypostyle, meaning the roof rests on rows of columns: 414 of them, in marble, granite and porphyry, taken from ancient sites such as Carthage, so their shafts and capitals vary. The 31.5-metre minaret, rising in three stages from a square base, is thought to be the oldest minaret still standing. The mosque became a model for later mosques across the Maghreb, the part of North Africa west of Egypt, and is part of Kairouan's World Heritage Site.

Great Mosque of KairouanRead card
Next card in the archiveLatin did not die with the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Scholars across Europe wrote in it for well over a thousand years, while the everyday Latin of ordinary people slowly turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.Read next →