The Dead Sea Scrolls

Hubby-Eric and I just got back from a long day down at the Seattle Center where we visited the Science Center and saw Discovering The Dead Sea Scrolls. The exhibit required tickets bought in advance, so we got our tickets several weeks ago when they were first announced. We decided on today because the school districts have today off (Veterans Day is tomorrow) and it isn't a Saturday.

We started out with a nice "healthy" meal at McDonald's, as I had a couple of free breakfasts left over from the Monopoly game (I mailed away for entries). We got down to the center at before 10am, before the Science Center even opened, and waited in line until the place opened. Our tickets were for the Egypt IMAX movie at 11:30 and DDS at 1:00. So we did a walk-through of all the current exhibits.

Building 1 is currently dominated by dinosaurs. We then moved into Building 2, which has a group of standard exhibits. But there's a new area that was built when the new IMAX theater was built, and we checked it out. It's currently housing the insect village (*shudder*) and the Tropical Butterfly House. We did the Butterfly house, which has a pretty high temperature and managed to drain me of a bit of energy. It was wonderfully beautiful, and I want to go back sometime (maybe with Torvald), but this morning it was surprisingly tiring. Building 3 has the exercise and nutrition exhibits now, and a bunch of other standards I remember from when I was a little kid running around the place. As we were getting close to 11, we headed across the Water Works to the old Eames IMAX theater.

The movie we saw was Mysteries of Egypt. It was about the discovery of King Tut's Tomb, and the impact it had on our knowledge of Egyptian history. It was an ok movie, but didn't have anything to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm not sure why we ended up buying tickets to it with the DDS exhibit, but I enjoyed it.

After the movie we did another walk through the other exhibits in the other direction, hitting some spots we'd missed on the first time through (I tend to rush when I do the Science Center, old habits). At 1pm we went into the exhibit. Security was tight. There were guards at every exit and stationed within the building at various spots. Every bag was checked, and when they spotted the flashlight in the bottom of my bag they warned me not to pull it out in the exhibit. As we went in, we were given nifty little audio devices on lanyards that were programmed with exhibit information. At intervals along the walls were large numbers, and if you punched the number into the audio-thing you got a short lecture about what you were looking at. I worked out that I listened to 23 little lectures along the way.

The start of the exhibit was a short video that gave a very good sense of the basic history of the scrolls. It was nice to get the visual sense of the location of the scrolls discovery for later in the exhibit.

The build-up to the actual Dead Sea Scrolls took a good long time, but was extremely informative. The history of the scrolls discovery, then how they were recognized for what they were, came first. Then the science of preserving and dating the scrolls. Then the history of the area with the current theories about who the people who wrote the scrolls were. Then there was a gallery of three reproductions of other scrolls to prep folks for the real thing.

There were artifacts in the earlier galleries that were not as sensitive to light. Among the coolest things were a collection of coins found in the ruins of Qumran (where the scrolls were found) and a bunch of jigsaw puzzles dumped into a bin to give people an idea of how difficult it was to reconstruct some of the scrolls. It was crowded but wasn't too bad. I'm a person who really can't handle crowds most of the time.

After going through the first seven galleries we finally climbed the ramp and went into the room with the Dead Sea Scrolls. We went to each of the ten displays, waiting at each one because the lights weren't on all the time. The scrolls are that delicate. The lights came up for a few seconds then would go down for a half minute. After a few minutes in the gallery, I started to feel a stitch in my side. I persisted, but the pain got worse as we visited each scroll. I couldn't lift my arms or take a deep breath without agonizing pain. I barely made it through the exhibit, I hurt so much as we finished.

We visited the last gallery then I staggered into the gift shop. There was a cool breeze in there, and it revived me, slowly. After we bought the catalog of scrolls and left, I started to feel even better. Once we were out of the gift shop I was able to take a deep breath without pain. It wasn't until later that I realized that it was probably the environment in the room with the scrolls that had the massively negative effect on me. When you combine the hot and humid butterfly room in only a few hours with the extremely dry air in the scrolls room... well, it made me pretty sick. Luckily the effect was very temporary.

After we got out of the exhibit it was nearly 3pm, and we hadn't eaten lunch, so we headed out to the Center House and got a late lunch. Then we went across the way to the arcade and hubby-Eric played the Doctor Who pinball game. He got a free round out of it, too. I was still a bit less than 100%, so we left after that. I did a check on the pedometer map when we got home, and I figure we walked over a mile and half (since we parked at the far end of the Center).

All in all, a fun day and a fascinating experience. I'm glad we got the book, as it has the information on all ten scrolls with the translations (that I wasn't able to read in the gallery itself).