Parchments and papyri

In 1909 several texts on parchment were found in a sealed stone jar in a cave near the town of Avroman, in the mountain Kuh-e Salan; these were then brought to London, and eventually ended up in the British Museum. Like their later counterparts, the Greek parchments are what are known as double documents: the text is written out twice, with the upper text wrapped up and then tied off to later act as a check against fraud when read against the contents of the lower half. Many of the papyri from the archives are double documents, like the Greek Avroman texts. In the earlier papyri, we see a tendency towards abbreviation of the inner texts that began to reverse again in the Roman era. Discussing “Hellenized” Jews when looking to the paperwork from Nahal Hever and explaining the use of Greek language and potentially legal formulas in their paperwork is a misstep.