Dead Sea Scroll Jar, actual size replicas (without scroll) #3.
The story of Dead Sea Scrolls, according to the official record, in 1947, a few Bedouin boys were grazing their flocks near the Dead Sea. One of the boys, in searching for a lost goat, climbed up a cliffs in search for his goat. Thinking that perhaps the goat had wandered into a cave, he threw a stone into the opening in an attempt to spook the goat, if it had been in there, back out. The sound that he heard from inside the cave was unexpected - the stone hit pottery.
And so it was that one of the most valuable archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century was made - a number of pottery jars in the cave contained the ancient scrolls of a hidden library dating from before the first century AD.
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) • 1st century BCE Click to see the scrolls: http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah#53:1