Sunday, November 14, 2004

THE "DEAD SEA SCROLLS OF BUDDHISM" have been in the news a fair bit lately. Here's an article on them:
Wanted: Dead Sea Scrolls Of Buddhism
(Independent Online, South Africa)

November 13 2004 at 03:29PM

The Afghan government is to request the return of the Dead Sea Scrolls Of Buddhism from the British Library, amid concerns the priceless manuscripts were looted during civil war in the early 1990s.

Afghanistan's Minister of Culture will formally ask for the 2 000-year-old scrolls to be sent from London to the newly restored Kabul Museum in the next few weeks as part of a campaign to bring home stolen treasures from foreign collections.

The British Library, whose conservation experts saved the scrolls from crumbling, has admitted it has no idea how they came to London from one of Afghanistan's most famous historical sites at Hadda near the Khyber Pass.

The British Library said it had bought the scrolls in 1994 from a British dealer out of concern that they were deteriorating rapidly and needed emergency restoration work to ensure that they were not lost.

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