Some scrolls are in Aramaic, the language spoken by many inhabitants of the region from the sixth century BCE to the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The majority of the texts on the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew, with some fragments written in an ancient version of its alphabet thought to have fallen out of use in the fifth century BCE. The area was known as Judea at that time, and the people are thought to have belonged to a group called the Essenes, a devout Jewish sect. According to the prevailing theory, they are the work of a population that inhabited the area until Roman troops destroyed the settlement around 70 CE. The origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written around 2,000 years ago between 150 BCE and 70 CE, is still the subject of scholarly debate even today. It soon became clear that this was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made.

Word of the find spread, and Bedouins and archaeologists eventually unearthed tens of thousands of additional scroll fragments from 10 nearby caves together they make up between 800 and 900 manuscripts. The teenagers took the seven scrolls to a nearby town where they were sold for a small sum to a local antiquities dealer. He and his companions later entered the cave and stumbled across a collection of large clay jars, seven of which contained scrolls with writing on them. One of these young shepherds tossed a rock into an opening on the side of a cliff and was surprised to hear a shattering sound. In late 1946 or early 1947, three Bedouin teenagers were tending their goats and sheep near the ancient settlement of Qumran, located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in what is now known as the West Bank.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

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