The Allegro Jar and Lid

On the basis of documentation and photographs, we have verified that the jar and lid were purchased by John Allegro on or before January 1964 from Kando, a licensed antiquities dealer in Bethlehem. He was told these came from the Qumran area, and indeed at this the time Bedouin continued to excavate caves in the Qumran area and offer material for sale. The jar and lid are now in the private collection of Mrs Judith Brown, Allegro’s daughter, and we are very grateful to her for allowing us to document and study them.

The photographs were taken in 2019 by Joan Taylor and appear here in order to show the morphology of both the jar and lid. Discussion of the jar appears in Joan E. Taylor, ‘The Allegro and Schøyen Jars among the Qumran Jars,’ in Torleif Elgvin, Kipp Davis, Michael Langlois (eds), Gleanings from the Caves:Dead Sea Scrolls and Artefacts from The Schøyen Collection (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 393-426. A further examination, with details of the results of the DQCAAS analysis of the lid residue, will appear in a forthcoming article. For an announcement about the results of the residue analysis, see https://dqcaas.com/2019/11/24/dead-sea-jar-lid-found-to-hold-decomposed-papyrus/