When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Researchers have finally deciphered a 1,year-old scroll describing a tense court case during the Roman occupation of Israel. The finding reveals more about criminal cases from the time and answers a longstanding question about slave ownership in the region.
In , a researcher organizing papyri in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority's storeroom made a surprising discovery: the longest Greek papyrus ever found in the Judaean desert. The document had been classified as written in Nabataean, an ancient Arabic dialect. Over the following decade, Cotton assembled a team of experts to decipher the line text, which details legal proceedings when the region was a province in the Roman Empire.
Her team's work on the document was published Jan. The researchers found that the papyrus contained a set of notes that a prosecutor may have used to prepare for a trial in front of Roman officials during the reign of Emperor Hadrian A.
Related: 1,year-old oil lamp found in Jerusalem shows a rare Jewish menorah, even though the Romans tried to suppress the religion. The court case referenced in the papyrus text centered on two people β Gadalias and Saulos β who forged documents related to selling and freeing slaves to get around paying Roman taxes.
According to the study, the document also contained a hastily jotted transcript of the trial and notes from one prosecutor to another discussing strategy. But significant parts of the papyrus are missing, thwarting the researchers' efforts to fully understand the meaning of the text, the researchers said in the study. Missing details include where the trial took place, where the defendants lived and whether they were Roman citizens.
