PRESS RELEASE March 27, 2013 Media Contacts: Casey Kroger, (513) 608-5777 - cell,
[email protected] Jenna Kehrt (513) 373-6592 - cell,
[email protected] Natalie Hastings (513) 325-3142 – cell,
[email protected] Press Site: www.cincymuseum.org/dead-sea-scrolls/press World’s Oldest and Best-Preserved Parchment of The Ten Commandments Coming to Cincinnati for 17 Days Only Special Gift from Great American Insurance Group brings treasured 2,100-year-old-scroll to Cincinnati Museum Center from Good Friday (March 29) to April 14 CINCINNATI – The oldest and best-preserved parchment manuscript containing the Ten Commandments –the pillars of morality and law in the Western world and which 3,500 years later were written into the civil and criminal codes of 12 of the original 13 U.S. colonies – will be on view in Cincinnati Museum Center’s blockbuster exhibition, Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times. Written in Hebrew between 50 BCE - 1 BCE on a parchment scroll measuring just over 18 inches by 3 inches, the Ten Commandments Scroll will be on view from Friday, March 29 to Sunday, April 14, when the exhibition closes. The text, from the biblical book of Deuteronomy, encapsulates and defines how ancient Israelite men and women should work and live with one another and outlines their relationship with their god. Only two ancient manuscripts of the Ten Commandments have been discovered to date: the Ten Commandments Scroll, and the Nash Papyrus, an incomplete papyrus text currently housed in the Cambridge University Library, and dating to 150 -100 BCE.