Between 1947 and 1956, a series of remarkable manuscript discoveries were made in caves near the Dead Sea, in what is now the West Bank, an area that had been largely unexplored by archaeologists prior to these finds. The manuscripts, which came to be known collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls, include some of the oldest surviving copies of Hebrew biblical texts, predating other previously known manuscripts by roughly a thousand years. The scrolls also include a wide range of other texts, including community rules, calendars, and previously unknown religious writings, offering historians an unprecedented window into Jewish religious and cultural life in the centuries surrounding the turn of the millennium. Scholars generally attribute the scrolls to a Jewish sect that inhabited the nearby settlement, believed to have hidden the manuscripts in nearby caves, possibly in response to the threat posed by advancing Roman forces during a period of regional conflict. The preservation of the scrolls, remarkable given their age, is largely attributed to the exceptionally dry climate of the region, combined with the sealed, dark environment provided by the caves themselves. Piecing together the fragmentary scrolls, many of which survived only as small fragments rather than complete texts, has proven to be a painstaking, decades-long undertaking involving specialists from multiple academic disciplines. The scrolls remain one of archaeology's most significant discoveries, continuing to inform ongoing scholarly debates regarding the textual history and development of the Hebrew Bible.