Qumran

This aerial photograph shows the settlement of Qumran, which is located in the Judaean Desert, which is probably where a group of people known as the Essenes lived between ca. 150 BCE and 72/73 CE. Most scholars think that the people who lived here wrote and/or copied the Dead Sea Scrolls. The photo shows not just the settlement of Qumran but also the marl terrace (behind it), where Caves 4 and 5 were located. A total of 11 caves that contained scrolls were found by Bedouin and archaeologists in the 1940s-1950s. The settlement's proximity to these two caves constitutes one of the major pieces of evidence for the connection between the Qumran inhabitants and the Dead Sea Scrolls.