science · 28 February 1953 · 71 years ago
death
Died 28 Feb 1953 at age 63 (born 12 Aug 1889).
Eliezer Lipa Sukenik was a Polish-Israeli archaeologist who established the date and provenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He settled in Israel in 1912, began teaching in 1914 and eventually became field archaeologist at the Hebrew University. He directed the excavations of the synagogues and Jewish tombs. In 1947, within the eleven caves near Qumran, north-west of the Dead Sea, Israel, parts of more than 700 ancient Jewish manuscripts were discovered. Most were written in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and fewer in Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls, as they came to be known, are assumed to have been the library of a sectarian community at Qumran. Sukenik devoted the rest of his life to their study.
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