One of the most spectacular finds in the Cave of Letters was a packet of
personal documents that belonged to a young Jewish woman named Babatha.
Probably born around A.D. 104, Babatha became a woman of means who, by the time
of her death around 132, owned valuable properties left to her by her father
and her two husbands. (For more background on her extraordinary life, see
Babatha's Life and Times.) Here, have a close look at one of the 35 papyrus
scrolls in the Babatha archive—a registration of land dating from the
year 127—and get an inkling of what life was like for a well-to-do Jewish
woman living under Roman rule in the second century. To launch the
interactive, click on the image at left.—Peter Tyson
Note: The translation of Babatha's document comes from The Documents From the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, edited by Naphtali Lewis (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989), and is used with kind permission of the publisher.
