Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are up for sale, in tiny pieces.
Nearly 70 years after the discovery of the world's oldest biblical manuscripts, the Palestinian family who originally sold them to scholars and institutions is now quietly marketing the leftovers - fragments the family says it has kept in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years.
Most of these scraps are barely postage-stamp-sized, and some are blank. But in the last few years, evangelical Christian collectors and institutions in the US have forked out millions of dollars for a chunk of this archaeological treasure.
This angers Israel's government antiquities authority, which holds most of the scrolls and�claims that every last scrap should be recognised as Israeli cultural property.
"I told Kando many years ago, as far as I'm concerned, he can die with those scrolls," said Amir Ganor, head of the authority's anti-looting squad, speaking of William Kando, who maintains his family's Dead Sea Scrolls collection. "The scrolls' only address is the State of Israel."
Kando says his family offered its remaining fragments to the antiquities authority and other Israeli institutions, but they could not afford them.
"If anyone is interested, we are ready to sell," Kando told The Associated Press, sitting in the Jerusalem antiquities shop he inherited from his late father. "These are the most important things in the world."
The discovery of the scrolls in 1947, in caves by the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, was one of the greatest archaeological events of the 20th century.�
Written mostly on animal skin parchment about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy Land.
Israel regards the scrolls a�national treasure and keeps its share of them in a secure, climate-controlled, government-operated lab on the Israel Museum campus in Jerusalem.
Kando would not say how many more fragments are in his family's collection. Scholars consider Kando's fragments to be authentic because his father was directly involved in the sale of scrolls when they were first discovered and estimate that the Kandos are still holding onto around 20 fragments.
New scroll fragments from the Dead Sea region have surfaced in recent years from different sources.
In 2005, Israeli police raided the home of Hanan Eshel, an Israeli scrolls scholar, after he facilitated the purchase of scroll fragments from a Bedouin man who said he discovered them in a cave a year before. The fragments were unrelated to the Dead Sea Scrolls trove, but were found in the same region and dated to the 2nd century AD.
