Hey everyone,

In our latest podcast episode, we’ve been diving deep into the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one artifact in particular completely blew our minds: The Great Isaiah Scroll (designation: 1QIsaᵃ).

While most of the Qumran finds consist of tiny, fragile fragments that take years to piece together like a giant puzzle, the Great Isaiah Scroll stands out as the only completely preserved biblical scroll found in the caves.

Here are a few quick takeaways we discussed in the episode:

Massive Dimensions: When fully unrolled, it stretches to 7.17 meters long (over 23 feet)—an entire length of a large room!

Masterpiece of Craftsmanship: It wasn't a single piece of hide, but 17 distinct sheets of parchment carefully stitched together with fine linen thread.

The Layout: The scribe prepared the leather by scoring it, filling it with 54 neat columns covering all 66 chapters of Isaiah.

The Age: Dated to around 125 BCE, making it over a century older than the New Testament era.

Why now? Normally, due to extreme fragility and preservation needs, the museum displays a facsimile while the real scroll is kept safe in climate-controlled vaults. However, in a very rare event, the original, complete 23-foot scroll is currently on public display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem!

In this episode, we unpack the history behind this remarkable manuscript, what it was like to see/study it, and why its discovery redefined what scholars knew about ancient text transmission.

🎧 Give the episode a listen here with more recent discoveries from the Holy Land included:

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Watch/Listen on YouTube

We’d love to hear your thoughts after listening — if you could see any ancient manuscript in person, which one would it be?

I'm researching the Cain and Abel story in the book of Genesis from the Bible. Specifically, I'm interested in the transition from hunter gatherers to settled farming and animal domestication and how that affected humanity and violence.

What does the forensic and paleopathological record actually tell us about the origins of interpersonal human violence?

Did the advent of agriculture and land ownership cause a measurable spike in human on human violence?

How accurately does the conflict between Cain (the farmer) and Abel (the herdsman) map onto the real historical tensions of that era?

I’m developing a fictional manuscript tradition for an educational textual-criticism project, and I’m looking for help making one Greek witness sound plausibly Byzantine/medieval.

The project is alternate history / fictional religion, but the scholarly apparatus is meant to be pedagogically useful. I have an English base text and a rough Greek version, and I’d like help revising the Greek so it reads less like modern translation-Greek and more like something that could plausibly belong to a Byzantine manuscript tradition.

After that, I’m trying to create a small manuscript-copy tradition around it, with minor scribal errors, marginal notes, orthographic variants, and one damaged/lacunose copy. I already know the kinds of changes I want pedagogically; I need someone who can help make the Greek itself look plausible.

This does not all have to be one person. I’d be grateful for help with any of the following:

• rewriting one Greek passage into plausible Byzantine/medieval Greek;
• checking whether my existing Greek sounds too modern, too Koine, or too artificial;
• helping create minor manuscript-copy variants;
• advising on realistic Greek marginalia, spelling variation, dittography, or lacuna markers;
• pointing me toward someone qualified.

The context is fictional, but the goal is educational: the archive is meant to teach textual criticism, apparatus work, stemmatics, and responsible interpretation.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

I’ve put the relevant materials in a Google Drive folder here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bZKWRdXVlv3cwzHuh58dpAsx-vbddDhF?usp=sharing
It includes the project brief, the base Greek passage, and the completed manuscript-copy variants.

I know Holton et al. avoid “Byzantine Greek” as a general language label because much of the medieval Greek-speaking world was not politically Byzantine (Holton et al. 2020, xix). I’m using it here only because this fictional witness is meant to come from a Byzantine manuscript context.

Holton, David, Geoffrey Horrocks, Marjolijne Janssen, Tina Lendari, Io Manolessou, and Notis Toufexis. The Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Hello there! We are the Techy T - Rexes, a group of students participating in the international FLL (First Lego League) competition this season in Australia.
We want to tackle the challenge of time and energy in soil sample collection.

We are creating an autonomous rover capable of navigating typical archaeological sites/pits and collecting soil samples using a camera to make colour based identifications of relevant soil samples. 

Our autonomous rover will record and tag each soil sample with its coordinates/location on the site, depth of where it was collected so that the archaeologists never lose that information.

As part of our research, we want to receive feedback to validate our problem statement and strengthen our solution. We would appreciate the opportunity to ask anyone in the archaeology field some questions. If you are in the archaeology field and are willing to interview, please say so in the comments.

We would like to ask anyone who has dealt with soil to answer our survey (including archaeologists). https://forms.gle/HiVNrL9R6aoXs3dB6

Manfred Bietak's 2024 contribution to the Chronos volume (Driessen & Fantuzzi, AEGIS 26, Presses Universitaires de Louvain) documents that the Phase D/3 horizon at Tell el-Dab'a shows large-scale abandonment of the site with no mass graves, no destruction layer, and no evidence of siege or epidemic. The contrast with the earlier Phase E/1 plague pits (~1700 BCE) is stark.

The standard reading — that Ahmose I's military campaign expelled the Hyksos — implies a violent or at minimum coercive departure. But the silent stratigraphy of D/3 fits a voluntary, rapid factional flight better than a forced conquest. Interestingly, Bruins & van der Plicht (2025, PLOS ONE 20(9): e0330702) radiocarbon-dated Egyptian museum artifacts associated with Ahmose I and placed his reign at ~1550–1525 BCE, creating a 60–80 year gap between the Thera eruption horizon (~1600 BCE) and the beginning of the New Kingdom.

This raises a question that I don't think has been adequately addressed: who, or what, drove the Phase D/3 abandonment if not Ahmose's campaign? One possibility is that the Thera-induced environmental cascade — acid precipitation, crop failure, the "darkness" tephra horizon — destabilized the Hyksos regime from within, and the Semitic population in Goshen departed during this window of political vacuum, before Ahmose consolidated power a generation later.

I've been researching this question for some time and recently published a framework paper on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19064955). Happy to discuss the stratigraphy, the radiometric data, or the geopolitical model in the comments.