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11:05 AM ET 01/28/98 FEATURE-Evidence of Dead Sea sect found after 2000 years By Janine Zacharia EIN GEDI, Israel (Reuters) - There is a mystery buried near this oasis overlooking the lowest place on earth, a 2,000-year-old question mark over a long-vanished monastic sect that may once have included John the Baptist. Now archeologist Yizhar Hirschfeld thinks he has unearthed part of the answer. Digging in a forbidding desert site all but ignored by archeologists for decades, he believes he has identified for the first time a home of the Essenes, a first century Jewish sect viewed as precursors to early Christians. Flying in the face of most scholars, Hirschfeld places the Essenes here, 200 yards above the popular hiking spot of Ein Gedi and roughly 12 miles from Qumran, the site many of his colleagues believe was the sect's primary home. It was in Qumran, a cave-pocked site at the northern tip of the Dead Sea, that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s. Known for their esoteric lifestyle and strict ritual observance, the Essenes are believed by many scholars to have written the scrolls, numbering some 800 parchment documents, among them ancient biblical texts. But Hirschfeld, of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, says no.He and scholars such as Norman Golb of the University of Chicago believe the scrolls were actually an important, massive archive rushed from Jerusalem to the caves at the Dead Sea for hiding and protection from the invading Romans. ``ONLY PALM TREES FOR COMPANY'' Hirschfeld's Ein Gedi site and its inhabitants were described in detail by Roman historian Pliny the Elder in the first century. The Essenes were a ``solitary tribe ... remarkable beyond all the other tribes in the whole world as it has no women and has renounced all sexual desire, has no money and only palm trees for company,'' Pliny wrote. ``Lying below the Essenes was formerly the town of Ein Gedi, second only to Jerusalem in the fertility of the land and in its grove of palm trees.'' Israeli archeologists first located the site in the early 1950s but gave it only a perfunctory, unspecific date of either the Roman or Byzantine era, extending over seven centuries. Hirschfeld's team found the first sign this week that the site was likely to have been the Essene one described by Pliny: pottery remains of the style used during the time the Essenes would have lived there. The shards were found in one of roughly 20 plain rectangular cells, each large enough to house one man, that Hirschfeld believes are characteristic of those that would have housed individual members of the ascetic religious sect. ``The pottery is typical of the first century,'' he said. ``It enables us to connect the historical background we have about the Essenes living above Ein Gedi with the remains.'' The finds included the base of a thumb-sized glass perfume bottle believed to have held balsam scents harvested by the Essenes. But Hirschfeld's hunch that the Essenes may have lived here is regarded with caution by other experts. ``I don't doubt that this may have been an Essenes site because we know there were many Essene villages along the Dead Sea,'' said Stephen Pfann, director of Jerusalem's inter-faith Center for the Study of the Early Church. ``But most scholars wouldn't rely on Pliny's description to say this is exactly where they lived,'' he said. And, he added, while the first century pottery findings are ``interesting, they can be found anywhere in the area.'' 'POTTERY ISN'T FINAL PROOF' Hirschfeld admits ``the pottery isn't final proof'' that the village was Essene, but calls it a ``further indication.'' Without an inscription of some sort it will be difficult to say with certainty that the site is Essene, he says. Nor can the new find discount completely the conventional wisdom he rejects that the Essenes lived at Qumran. While Hirschfeld says there is no historical or archeological evidence to say that the Essenes in fact lived at Qumran, scholars like Pfann strongly disagree. They point to evidence including a large number of immersion pools and a cemetery characteristic of Essene burial at the Qumran site. Despite the lack of absolute corroborating evidence, Hirschfeld has little doubt the site he has excavated at Ein Gedi is one that would certainly have suited the Essene lifestyle. ``It's a divine place,'' he said, looking out at the Dead Sea and the majestic red rock hills beyond it. ``The view. The location. It's magnificent and close to heaven.'' ^REUTERS@