The Provenance of the “Seiyal Collection”: History and Implications

This article considers the collection history of the so-called “Seiyal Collection,” purchased by the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1952 and 1953. While the Taʿamireh Bedouin and/or Khalil Iskander Shahin reported the material as coming from Wadi Seiyal, much if not all of the material was actually looted from caves in Nahal Hever. The common claim that the Bedouin misreported the findspot to hide the fact that they had smuggled the material from Israel into then-Jordanian-held East Jerusalem cannot be correct, as the caves along both Wadi Seiyal and Nahal Hever are on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The article considers why the provenance was misreported, whether the scrolls team knew that the material had been smuggled from Israel, and the implications of these issues both for our understanding of the scrolls and for scholarly ethics.