On Scrolls, Artefacts and Intellectual Property.

• Author: Van Peursen, Wido
• Position: Book Review

On Scrolls, Artefacts and Intellectual Property. Edited by TIMOTHY H. LIM, HECTOR L. MACQUEEN, and CALUM M. CARMICHAEL. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series, vol. 38. Sheffield: SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS, 2001. Pp. 269. $80.

This volume contains the papers read at a symposium held on 19 May 1999 at New College, Cambridge, on intellectual property and cultural artefacts. The purpose of this symposium was "to address the interdisciplinary issue of the intellectual property rights of archaeologists, principal text editors and curators in the study, publication and preservation of artefacts" (p. 15).

The book focuses on issues arising out of the lawsuit Qimron v. Shanks. From 1980 onwards, Professor John Strugnell of Harvard University and Elisha Qimron, professor of Hebrew Language at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, cooperated in the decipherment and reconstruction of 4QMMT. From the sixty to seventy fragments of this text, belonging to six copies, Qimron assembled a composite text of 121 lines. In 1990 the two scholars made an agreement with Oxford University Press that it would publish their work, including photographs of the scroll, the final version of the composite text, its translation into English, exegetical notes, and a commentary. (This work appeared in 1994 as volume 10 of the DJD series.)

In December 1990 Professor Z. J. Kapera of Krakow published a draft of Qimron's composite text in The Qumran Chronicle. After a warning from the director of the Israel Antiquities Authorities, Kapera wrote a letter of apology and stopped the distribution of his bulletin. However, in November 1991 Hershel Shanks republished Kapera's text in A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Robert H. Eisenman and James M. Robinson. Shanks, who had struggled many years for the "liberation" of the scrolls, wrote a sharp, polemical foreword in which he criticized the editors of the scrolls for their refusal to provide access to the unpublished scrolls. Qimron's name was not mentioned at all.

Qimron, who by then had given eleven years of his life to the research and decipherment of 4QMMT, was deeply shocked by the publication of Shanks' book. He brought a lawsuit in the District Court of Jerusalem on 14 January 1992 against Shanks, the Biblical Archaeological Society, Eisenman, and Robinson. Qimron sought an injunction and damages in the amount of NIS 472,500 (the equivalent of $250,000). On 30 March 1993 the District Court...