The oldest discovery on this shelf, and it was made half a century before anyone opened a cave. In 1896 Solomon Schechter brought to Cambridge the contents of the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, where worn manuscripts had been laid aside for centuries rather than destroyed. Among them were two medieval copies of a Hebrew work of communal discipline that nobody could place.
Fifty years later, when fragments of the same text turned up in the Qumran caves, it became clear what Schechter had found: the Damascus Document, a rule of the same movement, preserved in Egypt long after the community itself had gone. This collection holds it. Manuscripts are listed by their sigla, with word counts. Scrolls too long or too fragmented for a single page are split into numbered parts.