Inside Israel’s Hidden Antiquities Vaults： Rare Ancient Coins & Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed

Hello, all Israel News viewers. I'm Maureen Moran, and today we're going into the Israel Antiquities Authority to show you guys something extremely rare and extremely exclusive, as we've been invited to go inside the vaults of the Israel Antiquities Authority to show you guys rare and ancient coins, the Dead Sea Scrolls, things that people in the public never gets to see. Let's go and show you guys all the amazing findings. So here you're in the in the this is the coin department of the Israel Antiquities Authority. This department is quite old. It's one of the oldest departments in in this country in terms of archaeology. It's more than 100 years old. It started up during the even before the British officially set up their the mandate in 1922, where this department was already active in, I think, in 1920. We have something like 600,000 coins in this in this in this in this vault, of which we have 200,000 identified. This department is constantly evolving like we have to we have to register every year between three to 5000 coins. This collection is 99 percent provenance. So what you see here, 99 percent of the coins or 90 percent of the coins come from excavations or locations that we know. And these are the these are these shkalim, these are the shekels which were minted during the Jewish uprisings against the Romans. And what they did was what they did was every Jew, every Jew had to pay the temple tax half a shekel every year. This is this is a a a shekel, but it's not the same shekel. This is the shekel which was used before. It was minted in the Lebanese city of Tyre. And it was considered basically the only means of payment allowed. Even it's written in Talmud. Although it's a very pagan coin, this was because of its quality. If it's the silver in the 97 percent silver, it was considered the only means in which you could pay the temple. Again, again, we're talking about we're talking about a messianic group of of of guys of rebels that, you know, that they go to in uprising and that they, you know, they take it to to the limits. But this is what it is. So what does it say on that side? It says Jerusalem, the holy, Yerushalayim Hakdoshah. And on the other hand, it says Shekel Yisrael. And how old is this? And this is well, this is two thousand more than two thousand years. Yeah, more. No, almost almost a little bit less than 2000 years old. Sixty seven. But year five is year 70. Now, what happens in year 70? Destruction of the temple. When? 1780. When in when in 1780? Jerusalem was already surrounded by the by the army, by the Roman army. The man succeeded in escaping to Masada and took this coin with him in 72 in Masada. He died with his coin. It was found in Masada. So the coin I wanted to tell you, this is the this is the power of archaeology, because if I wouldn't know that the coin was found in Masada, I wouldn't be able to tell you this story. Yes, I wouldn't be able to tell you the story. So this is something it would just be year five. It's really a rare coin. It's a coin of a of a of a Hellenistic queen which ruled in Egypt. Her name is Berenice. And all the women of the dying of this dynasty of the Ptolemaic dynasty had three names or even Berenice, Cleopatra and another name. And this coin was found in near the city of David excavations. It's a very rare coin. We only know of 20 of these coins in the world. This was the only one found in an excavation. No, it's in the Givati parking lot excavations. Yeah, it's gold. It's made of gold, pure gold. It's a very special coin because queens usually do not appear with their with their name and and their their title on coins. And this coin it is. So it's a very it's a very rare coin. And she lived somewhere in the mid third century. She was the she was she started her her career as the queen of Cyrenaica, which is East Libya. And she married Ptolemy is the third who was ruler of Egypt. And and of course, it was constant warfare between the Egyptian kingdom and the Syrian kingdom. And somehow this coin ended up here. This is an excavation that was in northern Israel in Kukuk. So this is an excavation, not from the IAEA, is an excavation from an American university. And we found a hoard in which belongs probably to a building that the archaeologists think is probably the first medieval synagogue ever found in Israel. And these coins are Venetian coins. So these coins are these are the Ducato, the ducats, the famous Venetian ducats. These coins are the the silver grosso. And it's a fantastic find. We're talking about the 15th century Mamluk period. So really, that is, you know, we we, you know, we're not just we're not just interested in Jewish coins or anything. We study everything. Yeah, and this is our this is Shir Hamaalot Ine Matov Maneim, I think it's 136, if I'm not mistaken. OK, very good. We'd start from the line above. Shir Hamaalot Ine Matov Maneim You just read from a scroll that's 2000 years old. Now I asked our young friend Levi to read from the scroll, and he very quickly was able to read from it, because in the Second Temple period, they use square Hebrew script. This is the same square Hebrew script that we use today. It was found in Cave 11 at Qumran. This is one scroll in our collection of roughly 1000 manuscripts. Now, some of them are really nicely kept like this one. Some of them are very, very fragmentary. So very, very small pieces. We have about 25,000 fragments in our collection. The scrolls were found in the Judean Desert. The dry climate helped preserve the leather and the and the papyrus that our documents are written on. The biggest collection comes from Qumran, OK, which includes the earliest copies that we have of the biblical books. We have copies of all the books of the Bible, except for one. Esther, the Book of Esther, does not appear. The scholars debate why not. Yeah, we don't have Megillah Tester. We have every other book. This we have Ezra Nehemiah, we have. Yes, very good. This is one sheet out of five of that scroll that you see up there with the red circle around it. You can see the blackened area on top. That's due to exposure to moisture. What happens is the carbon ink, the ink, which is based in carbon, reacts to the infrared light. The parchment does not. And it begins to disappear. And now you can see the writing that disappears here because of the damage to the scroll. So even though the scroll is damaged, you can still read the text. Kabed, etimcha, etavicha, etimcha. Respect your father and mother. This is the oldest copy of the Ten Commandments that exists, OK? You have here the Ten Commandments in complete form. But there's something really cool about this scroll. While you guys look at it, I'm just going to tell a little bit of a story. The Ten Commandments appears twice in the Hebrew Bible. It appears in the book of Exodus and it appears in the book of Deuteronomy. OK, and the versions are slightly different. When we take a look at this scroll, it's actually quite interesting because it's merging both versions. And what we think this scroll was, was actually not just a copy of the biblical book, but actually a copy of the Ten Commandments. Specifically, that was meant to be read out loud and include all of the reasonings behind the commandments. These are the tefillin, tefillin shal yad, tefillin shal rosh. What? Why are they so small? Oh, so now let's compare them to modern day tefillin. OK, here we go. No, look, this is tefillin shal rosh today. Compare the size. Why is it so small as opposed to so large? In the Second Temple period, the person would have been wearing this not for half an hour in the morning to pray. He would have been all day. Imagine yourselves in the desert, in Qumran, in August, 40 degrees weather. And you have to walk around with this and this. So basically they made them very small, but it's still the same verses from the Bible, the same parshiyot. You can see how small the writing is. It's very, very, very difficult to read. But it is chunks of charcoal that were found in an archaeological excavation in 1970 at the synagogue in Ein Gedi. And in that synagogue, they had a holy ark with scrolls inside. And that synagogue burns down in the Byzantine period. And in 1970, it's excavated. A lot of that charcoal is just burnt wood. But maybe some of them are burnt scrolls. And one chunk is chosen about six centimeters in size and taken to be scanned in a micro CT scanner. And together with our partners at the University of Kentucky, Professor Brent Seals, using computer algorithms, the following happens. So let's see. So first of all, as the chunk is scanned, you can see that there are layers. The archaeologists were right. This is, in fact, a burnt scroll. Here you could see it a little bit better. Exciting, right? Is that good enough? No, we want more. Now, remember, this is a find that if I gave it to you to hold in your hand, it would just disintegrate. It would become black ash. Brent Seals takes these scans and he puts them through computer algorithms and he begins to separate layer by layer. So what you see here is what's marked in red on the side. And then he uses image enhancing capabilities. And what do we begin to see? Writing. OK. And if you have very, very, very good vision, you can see the word mizbeach, el, edah. So we have Hebrew writing on a burnt scroll, which you can't touch. But we can read it through the computer. Is that good enough? Not quite yet, because we want to do this more and more. You got the right answer. And so we're going to flatten this out to make it easier to read. And then we're going to do it over and over again until we get one. Two, three, four, five, six segments. We put them together and we end up with the book of Leviticus Vayikra, which was written in the third century C.E., burned in the destruction of the synagogue at Ein Gedi about 1500 years ago. Wow. I just came out of the tour and I can tell you guys that I feel extremely privileged to hold the coins that are thousands of years old to see the scrolls and just how much it proves that the very land shows that our presence has been here for thousands of years, that this is our homeland. And it really gives me a real sense of pride. So come and visit the Israel Antiquities Authorities. It will be open to the public in different ways very, very soon. So check out their website down below. And thank you guys so much for joining us. If you want more Israel related content, go to all Israel news dot com. And of course, don't forget to hit the notification bell, the subscribe button. And we'll see you guys in the next one.