ABC7 visits Qumran caves where Dead Sea Scrolls were found

JERUSALEM (KABC) -- Buried in the Israeli desert about 20 miles due east of Jerusalem lies the ancient settlement of Qumran. Built more than 100 years before the birth of Christ, wiped out in the year 68 by the Romans, remnants of the city remain to this day.

Typically, these ruins are off limits to the public, but ABC7 was given insider's access with Eyal Freiman, a local Israeli archeologist who helped uncover the artifacts there.

"I can feel a connection with the past, which is really nice," Freiman said. "I can see what he saw and it's very important for me. That's what drives me into archaeology."

Scored into the hills above are the caves of Qumran. Some were formed naturally while others were carved high into the limestone hills. Found inside nearly a dozen of those caves were hundreds of religious scrolls dating back to the early first century or older.

"They can remain in the desert conditions for a very long time," Freiman said.

Two thousand years to be exact. But with such a large gap in time, it's hard to determine much about who lived there, and why they hid the scrolls in the caves.

"We can't Google Qumran 2,000 years ago and have pictures and images," Freiman said. "So it's very important to keep the research alive and to keep the scrolls intact because we keep finding new things."

And new things are finding the scrolls as well. The Internet is now home to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and when people visit the Dead See Scrolls' official website, and see an image of a text, they're not actually looking at one photograph - they're looking at 28.

"We start with the low values of light," said Shai Helevi, the official photographer of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Antiquities Authority. "The shortwaves, show to human eyes as blue. Gradually work up to longer waves - infrared."

In simpler terms, they're deconstructing sunlight, and then putting the waves back together to form one final composite photograph. At times, darkened text, hidden by 2,000 years of damage comes alive under infrared light.

"We see here a big piece of history," Helevi said. "So we see a lot of texts that came right from history into the most high-tech systems possible, and I'm sitting right in between them, so it's a very unique position to be in."

The scrolls will be on display at the California Science Center beginning on March 10.