Metropolitan Museum – Network for the Study of Dispersed Qumran Cave Artefacts and Archival Sources (DQCAAS)

In November 2018, DQCAAS organised the visit of Dennis Mizzi to the Oriental Institute (Chicago), the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore), the Harvard Semitic Museum (Boston), and the Endowment for Biblical Research (Boston), in order to carry out renewed analysis of Qumran jars and lids held in these collections. It was arranged that he would be accompanied with Ms. Isabella Bossolino who undertook technical drawings and created a photographic dossier.

The purpose of this trip was to examine the jars afresh and prepare these new drawings that would rectify some inaccuracies identified in the earlier ones. For instance, the jar at the Oriental Institute (Q45) – illustrated in the feature image – is slightly lop-sided, which is at odds with the symmetrical jar illustrated in the ÉBAF card index – published in M. Fidanzio and J.-B., “Finds from the Qumran Caves: Roland de Vaux’s Inventory of the Excavations (1949–1956),” in The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014 (STDJ 118; ed. M. Fidanzio; Leiden: Brill, 2016) 263–332 [293].

Notably also the jar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was reconstructed after it broke in transit. The reconstruction is better than the original one undertaken by the Palestine Archaeological Museum, but this also means that the drawing in DJD 1, Fig. 2:10 (jar Q40) is, therefore, inaccurate.

As part of our study for the Network, therefore, we sought to identify the objects in the museums and match them with the material excavated by de Vaux, in order to obtain a complete record of which jars are in which collection. This was made possible by correlating first-hand observations with the ÉBAF archival material and documents made available by the museums. Here, we would like to thank the respective curators for their warm welcome and for being forthcoming with all their records.

We are very grateful to Ms. Isabella Bossolino, who is a PhD candidate candidate at the University of Pavia and Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, whose interests include Etruscan and Greek art and archaeology, together with Early Iron Age Mediterranean iconography. Having received her B.A. in Classics from the Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy, Isabella earned her M.Phil. in Archaeology and Art History for her work on “Malak Vanth: iconography and functions,” which won the 2014 Claudia Maccabruni prize for the best archaeology thesis. Her diploma thesis on “Neck, Shoulder, Body, Foot. Thoughts on the Anatomy of Vessels,” undertaken at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori, IUSS (Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia), is particularly useful for her work on our project, by providing technical drawings and digital images of the Qumran jars.

At present Isabella is writing her thesis on the late Iron Age and Archaic cemeteries of Kamiros, Rhodes, and is also in charge of the publication of the early Iron Age cemeteries of Kamiros, in addition to ceramic materials from excavations conducted by the University of Pavia in Verucchio, 2011 – 2017.

The network is delighted to host this guest blog, from Anne Dunn-Vaturi, researcher at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: From Qumran to New York: Documenting Provenance of a Dead Sea Scroll Jar.

In 1963 a Dead Sea Scroll jar from Qumran was entrusted by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to Richard J. Ward’s care, on his return from Jordan where he served as Economic Advisor to the U.S. aid mission. Dr. Ward, who was also Associate Professor of Economics at the C.W. Post College (today’s Long Island University Post), organized a lecture series by Dead Sea Scroll scholars while the jar was on display at the C.W. Post College Library in December 1963.

Post_Pioneer_Newspaper_Feature — Article from The Post Pioneer. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, LIU Post Library. Long Island University.

Shortly after, the jar was transported to The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a gift of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It was restored and installed in the Ancient Near Eastern gallery on 5 June, 1964. Although the information about Cave 1Q was known from the time of the acquisition of the jar, the provenance and published references of the object were not fully documented in our database.

As part of my mandate to document the ownership history of the collection of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern art, I was recently able to update the jar records thanks to the article “Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and its archaeological assemblage” published in 2017 by Joan E. Taylor, Dennis Mizzi and Marcello Fidanzio in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly. The jar, listed as Q40 in table 1 and the lid accompanying it later identified by Joan Taylor as Q22, were discovered in Cave 1Q in 1949.

Some of the jars from the same cave, including ours, were originally published in the first volume of Discoveries in the Judean Desert. In fact, the Met has one of three jars that are not the ‘classic’ cylindrical shape so we invite member(s) of the Project for the Study Dispersed Qumran Caves Artefacts and Archival Source to have a close look at it. It is currently on view in the case “Ancient Near East and the Bible” in Gallery 406 and it is part of the online Met collection .

References

Barthélemy, Dominique. and Józef Tadeusz Milik. 1955. Qumran Cave 1: Discoveries in the Judean Desert I. Oxford: OUP, p. 8, fig. 2:10.
Fidanzio, Marcello and Jean-Baptiste Humbert. 2016. “Finds from the Qumran Caves: Roland de Vaux’s Inventory of the Excavations (1949-1956),” in Marcello Fidanzio (ed.), The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014 (STDJ XX), Leiden: Brill, p. 265, n. 11, p. 267, table 18.1.
Taylor, Joan E., Dennis Mizzi, and Marcello Fidanzio. 2017. “Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and its Archaeological Assemblage.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 149, 4, table 1, p. 321.

Tag: Metropolitan Museum

USA Data Collection Trip 11-21 November 2018

Guest Blog: From Qumran to New York: Documenting Provenance of a Dead Sea Scroll Jar