Rockefeller Museum - Collections

Collections

The museum's first curator was John H. Iliffe, who arranged the artifacts in chronological order, from two million years ago to 1700 CE. Among the museum's prized possessions are 8th-century wooden panels from the al-Aqsa Mosque and 12th-century (Crusader-period) marble lintels from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Most of the collection consists of finds from the 1920s and 1930s. On display are artifacts unearthed in Jerusalem, Megiddo, Ashkelon, Lachish, Samaria, and Jericho.

Talmudic-era displays include a sixth-century mosaic floor, discovered in an ancient synagogue in Ein Gedi featuring a curse in Judeo-Aramaic that reads: “Anyone who neglects his family, provokes conflict, steals property, slanders his friends or reveals the secret of Ein Gedi’s balsam industry is cursed.”

Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran between 1947 and 1956, consisting of Jewish texts and commentaries, were housed in the Rockefeller Museum.

In 1967, following the Israeli invasion of East Jerusalem, the scrolls were seized by Israeli forces and relocated to the Shrine of the Book, a specially designed building on the grounds of the Israel Museum, with the ownership of these scrolls having been heavily contested ever since. The Copper Scroll was taken to the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman.