Jerusalem: Unopened scroll

This photograph shows what one of the Dead Sea Scrolls looked like when it was found (before it was unrolled). Though a scroll in this state is much easier to deal with than others that were broken into thousands of fragments, the 2,000 year-old state of the animal skin on which the text was written was extremely dry and fragile. They must be humidified and slowly unrolled over time. Often times insects had bored through them or the animal skin had stuck to itself in clumps. This scroll was 9.3 feet long when unrolled.