DEAD SEA SCROLLS — TREVER 429 



historical allusions, etc. But this method has led to such a wide 

 disagreement about dating (from the second century B. C. to the period 

 of the Crusades) that, without the help of other criteria, it would be 

 almost impossible to resolve the problem. Furthermore, the contri- 

 bution of the contents is largely to the date of the composition of the 

 writings rather than the specific dates of the scrolls in hand. It is 

 very probable that these scrolls are copies of earlier documents, not 

 original compositions. Thus we come to the subject of paleography, 

 or the study of the actual handwriting used on the documents, as a 

 means of adding at least further evidence for the dating of the 

 documents. 



The paleographer must begin by setting up a general pattern of 

 writing for a particular language on the basis of known dated mate- 

 rials, which for early Aramaic and Hebrew are admittedly not 

 very plentiful. There are, however, the fifth century B. C. Aramaic 

 papyri, many of which are dated to the year (pi. 4). Fortunately, 

 many letters of this type have been found in Egypt from approxi- 

 mately the same time, giving considerable comparative material to 

 illustrate the pattern of script at that time in Egypt. Knowing that 

 the Jews adopted the Aramaic language and script sometime after the 

 fifth century B. C, it is safe to start with these known dated Aramaic 

 materials.^^ 



Not all these letters were written on papyrus, however, for in the 

 Bodleian Library at Oxford there is a group of 12 letters written on 

 leather, which were found in Egypt. These can all be dated to 

 approximately 408 B. C., with a margin of error of no more than 2 

 or 3 years." The writer was able to examine some of these documents 

 at the Bodleian Library, through the courtesy of the librarian and 

 Dr. G. E. Driver, who is publishing them, and it is helpful to note 

 that the script on these letters is almost identical with that of the 

 papyri, indicating that these two media make very little difference 

 in the process of writing. Furthermore, these letters were written 

 in Persia, indicating that geographical location made little difference 

 in script at that time. 



On the other end of the scale, we can select a recent manuscript of 

 approximately known date to see what happens to the script over 

 a period of more than a thousand years; for example, the British 

 museum codex of the Pentateuch in Hebrew (Or. 4445), long con- 

 sidered to be one of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible in 



" The story of a new group of these papyri recently discovered has recently appeared : 

 Kraeling, Emil G., New light on the Elephantine colony, Bibl. Archaeol., vol. 15, No. 3, 

 pp. 49-67, September 1952 ; and now The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic papyri, by the same 

 author, Yale Univ. Press, 1953. 



« Driver, O. R., New Aramaic documents, Zeitschr. Alttestamentliche Wiss., vol. 62, pp. 

 .220-224, 1949-50. 



