Figure 31

Qumran Inkwell

No scraps of parchment were found at the site—a fact commonly attributed to destruction by fire and/or water over time—but de Vaux reported finding three inkwells, two made of clay and one made of bronze. Two of the inkwells were found in locus 30, commonly referred to as the “scriptorium”, and one was found in an immediately adjacent room (Nir-El, Y., Broshi, M., Black ink of the Qumran Scrolls. Dead Sea Discoveries 3 no. 2 (1996): 157-167). One further inkwell was found by another excavator of Qumran, Solomon Steckoll, in 1966–1967 (Steckoll, S., "Investigation of the inks used in writing the Dead Sea Scrolls." Nature 220 (1968), 91-92; Steckoll, S., "An inkwell from Qumran." Mada 13 (1969), 260-261 [in Hebrew]; Goranson, S., "Qumran: the evidence of the inkwells." Biblical Archaeology Review 19 no. 6 (1993): 67), and a fifth inkwell said to be from Qumran was bought by a private person in 1967 from Kando (Khalil Eskander Shahin), the antiquities dealer who also bought many of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Bedouin (Goranson, S., "An inkwell from Qumran." Michmanim 6 (1992), 39). In 1994, Stephen Goranson published a sixth inkwell identified as coming from Qumran in the private antiquities collection of Martin Schøyen of Oslo (Goranson, S., "A hub of scribal activity?" Biblical Archaeology Review 20 no. 5 (1994), 37-39). This last inkwell, referred to here as the Schøyen inkwell, is the subject of our present study.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen et al., “The Constituents of the Ink from a Qumran Inkwell: New Prospects for Provenancing the Ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39, no. 9 (2012): 2956.