Custody After a Border Moved

The scrolls now in Amman and the scrolls now in Jerusalem were once one collection in one building. The Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem held the material excavated from the Qumran caves through the 1950s. Jordan administered East Jerusalem at the time, nationalised the museum in 1966, and lost control of it in the war of 1967. Part of the collection had already been moved to Amman. The rest has been in Israeli hands since.

Everything that should follow from that is contested, and the atlas does not settle it. Jordan has asked for the return of material held in Jerusalem. Israel holds it and treats its custody as lawful. Palestinian claims have been made as well. The legal arguments turn on the law of occupation, on the standing of a nationalisation carried out by an administering power, and on whether antiquities of this kind are the cultural property of a state or of a people, and specialists disagree about each of those in turn. There is no neutral vocabulary for the dispute, which is itself part of why it persists.

What this atlas records is narrower and checkable. This museum holds the Copper Scroll and a substantial part of the material excavated before 1967. It does not record that any party is entitled to what another party holds, because that is not a question a reference work can answer on a reader's behalf. A reader who wants the argument should go to the parties and to the legal literature rather than take a position from an encyclopedia entry.