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In 1960, Pinchas Porat, an enthusiastic young volunteer on his first
archeological dig, helped uncover some of the most important relics ever found
from the Second Revolt of Jews against the Romans in A.D. 132. Porat, who died
in 2002, later became a faculty member in biblical history and archeology at
the Jerusalem Center for Biblical Studies. He also directed several excavations,
including the 1994 Bethsaida dig near the Sea of Galilee, considered one of
Israel's priceless sites. In this interview, conducted during NOVA's dig at the
Cave of Letters some 40 years after his finds there, Porat fondly reminisces
about his team's discoveries and explains the importance of the 1960 expedition
to its legendary leader, Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin, and to the people of
Israel.
A reason to dig
NOVA:
You weren't an archeologist at the time of the 1960 expedition. How did you
become involved?
Porat: There had been a lot of talk about the expedition as well as
advertisements in the newspapers and on the radio asking for volunteers to help
out on an excavation in the Judean desert. A large number of people volunteered
and I was among them. It was my first archeological dig, although I'd been
interested in archeology since childhood.
NOVA: Why was this dig such a major event at the time?
Porat: The whole legacy of the history of Israel was at stake. Israel had been
founded only 12 years earlier, in 1948, but the heritage of its people is
ancient. We have very few surviving personal artifacts from Israeli antiquity,
and there has always been a drive to find more. Furthermore, the majority of
documents, scrolls, or books which Bedouin tribes previously excavated they
immediately sold to the Jordanian government, even though it was clear that
the Bedouin often conducted searches within Israel's pre-1967 borders. At the time,
Jordan owned almost all the important written materials that had been
discovered, and Israelis desperately wanted to learn which of these precious
documents had been found inside Israel and were thus legitimately theirs.
NOVA: How would the 1960 expedition help Israel make a claim to the Bedouin
finds?
Porat: What would happen during these Bedouin missions is that if they found
anything with writing on it, which they knew was the most valuable kind of artifact, they would
scrutinize it right there. They would handle it, crumple it, look at it upside
down—they were quite coarse with it—and little pieces of these
documents would break off. What the archeologists on our expedition were hoping
for was to sift through the earth and find these little fragments. If they
could piece them to the documents that the Bedouin sold to Jordan—even
the slightest, smallest fragment—then we would know where those reunited
documents came from and to whom they belonged.
NOVA: Why was the Judean desert pinpointed as the destination for the
expedition?
Porat: The Israeli government had heard rumors that a group of Bedouin had
discovered some scrolls on an earlier expedition to a group of caves in the
Judean desert. The Bedouin had not retrieved them; they had only seen them at a
distance by lamplight, tucked away in the crevices of some rocks. A Jordanian
man who claimed to have witnessed this find approached the government and
offered to lead an expedition of Israelis back to the cave where they would
apparently be able to find these scrolls. He offered his services for the
princely sum of one million dollars. Israeli officials didn't really believe
him so they refused his offer, but there was some excitement generated. They
decided to organize their own Israeli expedition to four different locations in
the Judean desert.
NOVA: Paint a picture of the camp you were assigned to on the dig.
Porat: I was put in the northernmost camp, camp number four, which was Yigael
Yadin's camp. Yadin was a trained archeologist, a military leader, a
politician, though not a very successful one, and he was a great man. Every
night, after everyone had cleaned himself up and eaten dinner, we were invited
into Yadin's tent, where he would read to us from his books, lecture us, and
teach us. It was quite an experience, especially for me as a young person.
“I figured somebody would come looking for me if I didn’t come
out.”
Camp four was chosen for exploration because the areas above and opposite it
had been Roman army camps. If the Romans had built siege camps there, across
from and overlooking these desert caves, there must have been
people—Jews—in those caves whom they were guarding. That was the
logic of the dig site.
The unlikeliest places
NOVA:
And what were your duties on the mission?
Porat: On the first day of excavations, I was given the task of searching for
new, undiscovered caves. I worked with several soldiers from the Israeli army
along the western escarpment above the Dead Sea and En-gedi. We found nothing.
The second day, I was assigned to the caves. I was told to go along the sides
of the caves and check for entrances to unseen chambers. When I crawled into
the last room of what became known as the Cave of Letters, Room C, I was
working my way slowly along its walls when I found a crack, a crevice in the
rock. I decided to go in.
NOVA: This was your first day in the caves. It didn't bother you to just go
right into this crevice?
Porat: I figured somebody would come looking for me if I didn't come out. It
was very difficult for me to squeeze my way in because I was a little
overweight; I always have been. I had to push my way in really forcefully, and
I tumbled down into the opening on the other side of the crack. When I sat up
and shined my lantern around, I saw baskets filled with objects that looked
like round-bottomed jars. I picked one up and when I turned it
over—aaaaaaaaah!—it was a skull. It was rather scary to be stuck
down there alone and to stumble upon a crevice full of skulls. But I was very
excited, almost hysterical. I searched around a little more and discovered
fabric mats, other textiles, bones, and many skulls, some with lots of dark red
hair on them. Then I crawled out and called everyone over.
NOVA: What did you think you had found?
Porat: Before I realized the objects were skulls I thought I had found a
storeroom for jars. Then, of course, I realized that it was a tomb of some
sort. At the time I hadn't studied very much yet and I didn't know about the
Greco-Roman custom of secondary burial. If I had made the same discovery a few
years later, I would have immediately recognized that these 17 people had died
and been buried in the ground for a limited time. Their bodies had decomposed
in the ground and then later their skeletons were carefully exhumed and their
skulls were transferred to the baskets. Their bones were laid out on textile
shrouds next to the baskets. Traditionally, a second burial would take place in
an ossuary, a limestone burial box. But an ossuary might not have been
available to the cave dwellers who lived there, hence the baskets. Or perhaps
they had plans to move the remains again when they left the cave. We can't be
sure.
NOVA: What was the significance of the find for you and for Yadin?
Porat: The most important aspect of this discovery, especially on the
expedition's second day, was to prove that the Bedouin had not completely
looted the cave and that there was still a reason to explore it. That was
Yadin's goal: to prove that there were items hidden there that had remained
undiscovered for almost 2,000 years. We just had to look for them. And that's
what made the discovery so energizing.
“We dug and dug more and were ready to give up. Suddenly we found a
piece of rope.”
The discovery of the Niche of Skulls also proved that whoever lived in those
caves was probably there for a long time—long enough to wait for their
dead to decompose before giving them a secondary burial. It added to the story
of the people who lived in the caves. It gave us another window into how they
lived and how they died there.
NOVA: The Niche of Skulls was not your only big discovery on the dig. What else
did you find?
Porat: One day during the second week of excavations, the engineering corps of
the army brought a metal detector into the cave. I was assigned with a lady
named Ada, an acquaintance of mine, to work with a soldier who knew how to work
the metal detector. We went into a huge room where we'd previously found metal
coins, and we began to check with the metal detector for more. It immediately
gave off a very strong signal. It was telling us that a huge amount of metal
was present. We began to dig with small hand tools such as trowels and hammers.
We dug and dug. We soon realized that we were digging in a toilet. You can
imagine what we were finding in there.
NOVA: It was a toilet?
Porat: It was a toilet! It was an ancient toilet that was now buried beneath
lots of earth and stones that were thrown over it during other excavations.
What we were finding were dried up remnants of human feces. It was not very
pleasant.
NOVA: Why would a metal detector be going off in a toilet?
Porat: That's just what we were wondering. We had no idea why a metal detector
would be going off in a toilet, so we decided that the detector must be broken.
I'd worked in the Israeli army with metal detectors, so I knew that very often
in those days their vacuum tubes often broke and the device would go out of
order. The soldier agreed to take the metal detector apart and examine it. He
checked it out and said it was working perfectly. "There's metal down there,"
he said. We dug and dug more and were ready to give up. Suddenly we found a
piece of rope. We followed it down and continued uncovering the area. The rope
was attached to the handles of a basket. When we took it out and untied the
rope we discovered the 19 bronze vessels that are on exhibition in Jerusalem
today.
Windows on the past
NOVA:
Could Yadin and the other experts immediately identify the bronzes?
Porat: Yadin and the other archeologists there knew immediately that all but
one of the bronzes were of Italian manufacture. We could see that there was
pagan symbolism engraved on them, but it had been erased. That told us that
they had probably been the property of Jews. Jews would buy vessels like those
with pagan details on them and then erase them, because pagan symbolism and
ideology conflicted with Jewish religious beliefs.
NOVA: Why do you think the vessels were buried there and whom do you think
buried them?
Porat: People hiding in the cave left these personal objects there because they
probably never got out alive. They either never got the chance to escape and
take their belongings with them or possibly they surrendered, were sent into
slavery, or were executed and left their possessions behind for safekeeping. We
don't know exactly what befell them, but we can compare the Cave of Letters to
the other caves where we found no personal items whatsoever left behind, just
ancient garbage. Wherever they went, they took all their personal property with
them. For the inhabitants of the Cave of Letters, the story ended differently.
NOVA: What about the documents the Yadin expedition turned up in the Cave of
Letters?
Porat: They were a tremendous find. The documents literally defined the
expedition. They are the reason we call this cave the Cave of Letters. The
largest cache was the Babatha archive, which was not a collection of
religious documents but a personal archive that imparts a tremendous amount of
information on the everyday life of a woman named Babatha, who lived 2,000
years ago. Included among Babatha and her husband's documents were
correspondence, birth certificates, wedding contracts, adoption papers,
property deeds, and bills of purchase and sale, among other things. These kinds
of everyday documents are very rarely discovered. We also found, of course,
letters that the Jewish rebel leader Bar-Kokhba himself wrote and signed, an
astonishingly valuable cache revealing details of the Second Revolt.
NOVA: Many different excavations have taken place in the Cave of Letters. Has
everything been found that there is to find there?
Porat: I doubt that very much. I think there is still something to find, and I
think there will be for the ones who come after and the ones who come after
that. All of them will have something to find there. These caves are immense
and there are many, many passageways. Who knows how many haven't yet even been
discovered? So there will always be something to find. You would just need a
little bit of luck. 
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