Discovery of Aramaic Scroll May Reveal Biblical Mystery

The great lost section of Biblical history, the story of Man from the Creation to the Great Flood, may soon be revealed to the world.

Several antiquity authorities of Fogg Museum and the Department of Semitic Languages will be working for the next few months on the unrolling and translation of a leather parchment scroll brought to Cambridge this week by Archbishop Athanaseus Y. Samuel, Metropolitan of Jerusalem and Transjordan.

Book of Lameck

According to Robert H. Pfeiffer, Curator of the Semitic Museum, the scroll is believed to be the prophetic Book of Lameck, a primitive patriarch, mentioned in the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis. The prophet's inscription was identified in the first few lines of the parchment by William F. Albright, professor of Semantics at Johns Hopkins University.

Nomad tribes found the parchment in a cache of scrolls on the shores of the Dead Sea two years ago. Since that time, little has been done with the parchment because of its condition. It is, according to Pfeiffer a roll of sheepskin which has deteriorated greatly over the centuries until its is now a broken and hardened mass.

The translators' problem will come later, Pfeiffer continued. At present the great task is to unroll the manuscript without destroying it. The job has been turned over to Rutherford J. Gettens, the Museum's Chief of Technical Research, who is an expert on antiquities and their preservation.

One of four parchments brought to America six months ago by the Assyrian Archbishop, the Lameck scroll is the only one of the group written in the almost forgotten language of Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ.

The four scrolls are now the property of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. Three others were destroyed by the finders before they realized their value.