The caves are located about one mile (1.6 kilometres) west of the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, whence they derive their name. The 11 Qumran Caves lie in the immediate vicinity of the Hellenistic-period Jewish settlement at Khirbet Qumran in the eastern Judaean Desert, in the West Bank. Researchers have assembled a collection of 981 different manuscripts – discovered in 1946/47 and in 1956 – from 11 caves. However, a small number of well-preserved, almost intact manuscripts have survived – fewer than a dozen among those from the Qumran Caves. They represent the remnants of larger manuscripts damaged by natural causes or through human interference, with the vast majority holding only small scraps of text. Many thousands of written fragments have been discovered in the Dead Sea area. Ownership of the scrolls is also contested by the State of Palestine. As a result, some of the scrolls are still in Jordan and are now displayed at The Jordan Museum in Amman. Most of the scrolls are held by Israel in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, but their ownership is disputed by Jordan due to the Qumran Caves' history: following the End of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1947, Jordan occupied the area in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and Israel captured both it and several Scrolls claimed by Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. At the same time they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered to be a keystone in the history of archaeology with great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, along with deuterocanonical and extra-biblical manuscripts which preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered in 1946/7 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea.

Jordan 3 fragments