The scroll could not be read when it was found. Copper corrodes to brittle oxide, and the rolls had become rigid; unrolling them would have shattered the sheets and destroyed the text. Only a few letters were legible along the exposed edges, enough to show that there was writing and to make the problem urgent.
The solution was destructive and deliberate. In 1955 and 1956 the scroll was sent to the College of Technology at Manchester, where Professor H. Wright Baker cut it lengthwise into twenty-three curved strips using a purpose-built saw with a very fine blade, mounted so that each cut passed between lines of text. The strips could then be read individually. The operation is still cited in conservation literature as a justified irreversible intervention: the alternative was an unread document.
John Allegro, who was present at the cutting and worked on the transcription, published his own edition in 1960 ahead of the official one, which appeared under Jozef Milik in 1962 in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. The two men read the object in opposite ways, Allegro treating the list as a genuine record of hidden wealth and Milik as a folk legend, and the personal quarrel that followed coloured the scholarship for years.
The reading itself remains difficult. The punched script is irregular, several letters are ambiguous, and measurements and totals depend on decisions about individual characters. Later editions, including Emile Puech's re-edition after cleaning and conservation in the 1990s, have altered readings. The scroll is now held at the Jordan Museum in Amman.