Khirbet Qumran in the Nineteenth Century and the Name of the Site

Abstract

Kh. Qumran was visited by western explorers during the nineteenth century, long before the famous discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls nearby. The observations of these visitors supplement the preliminary reports of Roland de Vaux, who excavated the site in the 1950s. Do their transliterations of the name of the site (e.g. 'Goumran') indicate that the present site-name is inaccurate? Probably not, because a sound something like English 'g' was used by Bedouin guides for Arabic qāf. However, the origin of the name 'Qumran' remains obscure. One solution would be to see it as the Aramaic (Syriac) word qumrā, meaning 'belt', an apt name for the wadi that runs beside the ruin.