The scroll was found on 14 March 1952 in Cave 3, lying in two rolls against the cave wall, and it is unique among the roughly nine hundred manuscripts from the caves: three thin sheets of nearly pure copper, riveted together and inscribed by punching the letters through from the front, so that the text is legible in relief on the reverse.
Its contents are an inventory in twelve columns. Each entry gives a location and what is buried there, in a fixed and terse pattern: a place, a direction and distance, a depth in cubits, and a quantity of talents or a description of the vessels. Sixty-four locations are listed, sixty-three of them holding gold, silver, coined money, priestly vestments or cultic vessels; the last entry points to a duplicate document with fuller particulars, which has never been found.
The places named are real Judaean topography, cisterns, aqueducts, tomb entrances, terraces, the Valley of Achor, a place in the vicinity of the temple mount, but they are given as a person already familiar with the ground would give them, without the fixed reference points a stranger would need.
The language is not the literary Hebrew of the other scrolls. It is close to the Mishnaic Hebrew of a later period, with vocabulary from administration and building trades, which is part of why the scroll sits oddly in the Qumran corpus. Seven of the entries are followed by groups of two or three Greek letters whose purpose is unknown; suggestions have included abbreviations of names, indexing marks and cross-references to the missing duplicate, and none has been established.