A Bedouin shepherd came across the first of the ancient scrolls in 1947. He found them in pots in a cave in Qumran near the northern tip of the Dead Sea. Some were sold to a convent and others to an antiques dealer in Bethlehem. Once their authenticity was determined, archaeological expeditions and ancient robbers followed the caves and emptied of everything they could find.
But decades later, the Jewish desert had even more secrets to give up.
Amid signs that robbers are still searching for artifacts from the area, parts of which are difficult to reach and rule, the Israeli authorities have decided to conduct a methodical, comprehensive survey of the cliffs, gorges and caves that began in 2017, to execute.
“The archaeologists have always chased after the robbers,” Amir Ganor said. He is the leader of the antiquities prevention unit of the Antiquities Authority. “We decided it might be time to put the robbers in front of us.”
Aided by modern tools such as drones that could search every nook and cranny, three teams consisted of four people who each mapped 50 kilometers of cliff face across the Dead Sea.
Access to some of the caves would have been easier in ancient times. People knew how to move through the animal paths, Mr. Ganor said, and instead of rapping, they would have used rope walls for remote caves. But for more than 2,000 years, parts of the site collapsed, creating deep ravines.
The West Bank was under Jordanian control from 1948 until Israel conquered the area in the Middle East War in 1967. It is now divided between Israeli and partial Palestinian control. But the 1967 border does not exist in antiquity, Mr. Ganor said, and the archaeologists treated the Judean desert as one unit for the purposes of the survey.
In the MurabBa’at caves, in what is now the West Bank, archaeologists have unearthed a variety of artifacts. It included the basket and a cupboard of rare coins from the days of the Bar Kokhba uprising, minted with Jewish symbols such as a harp and date palms.