Toilet tied to tale of Dead Sea Scrolls
2006-11-21 01:30:10
One of the less sanitary aspects of life in Jesus' day has come into play in the debate over who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, how they lived and how they died.
The latest evidence comes from a site that two researchers have identified as the communal latrine for Qumran, the ancient settlement near the caves where the 2,000-year-old scrolls were found.
Israeli anthropologist Joe Zias and James Tabor, a biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, say the unusual placement of the latrine would be consistent with the theory that Qumran was inhabited by a hard-core Jewish sect known as the Essenes. They even speculate that the latrine's unsanitary conditions may have contributed to ill health among the sect's
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