Museum Travels Beyond Insurance to Protect the Priceless

San Diego’s Natural History Museum Took Extraordinary Steps to Protect Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are among the oldest documents, and greatest artifacts, in the world. So what do you do if they get lent to your museum? How do you insure something priceless and irreplaceable?

The answer is: you do, but you don’t.

Rather you ensure that nothing happens to them and that they are protected if — god, forbid — there is a fire, earthquake, or intrusion, according to George Brooks-Gonyer, the chief operating officer and chief financial officer at the San Diego Natural History Museum, in a recent interview.

Insurance Journal asked Brooks-Gonyer how a museum protects some of the unique property it houses and if the greatest potential liability is the monetary value, or an object’s importance to the public and academia.

Museums cannot adequately insure their priceless antiques and objects, generally because their value is largely scientific and cultural, Brooks-Gonyer noted. Instead they invest most of their energy into protecting the objects from disaster. One case in point is what his museum did when the Israel Antiquities Authority loaned 24 of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Natural History Museum for a six-month exhibit.

“Most of our exhibits contain priceless and irreplaceable artifacts of one kind or another,” he said. “You can’t put a monetary value on those at all. In many cases, those artifacts are also used in research. You have to protect them and you can never replace the. From an insurance point of view, it is obviously difficult to put a value on things like that because [they have] no value that you can place. I think for us, it places a real emphasis on preventing an accident from happening, versus dealing with it after the fact.”

The world has many treasures. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are on a whole different level. They are documents from a critical time in the development of the Judaism, and therefore Christianity also. The scrolls were written between the third century before the common era (BCE) and the first century of the common era (CE). They are thought to have been written or collected by a sect known as the Essene, who lived in an area that is now part of the West Bank and then was known as Qumran. The scrolls may also have come from Jerusalem.

Either way, they were placed in pottery jars and hidden in caves in Qumran sometime in the first century CE. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd wandered into one of the caves and stumbled on the first scrolls. Over the next decade other scrolls were discovered in caves in the area.

In total, archeologists discovered more than 100,000 scroll fragments, which have been assembled into more than 900 texts. They are the oldest copies of much of the Hebrew Bible, and before they were found the earliest copies were from about 1000 CE.

San Diego’s Natural History Museum was entrusted with the scroll that contains the oldest known copy of the Ten Commandments and the only scroll written on copper plate. It was lent the scrolls with sections of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah, among others — 24 scrolls in all.

The scrolls have been photographed, of course. But that does not really lessen the burden of responsibility of having them in one’s care.

Brooks-Gonyer said that his museum gets grilled mercilessly about its security and safety precautions by all the lenders who entrust valuables to his museum. “With every one of the exhibits that comes here, we have to pass a whole series of tests to make sure we are up to speed,” he said.

The museum has the most up-to-date climate control, camera systems and in-house security. But even with that, the museum had to spend $1 million to upgrade its temperature and humidity control system for the scrolls.

In total, the museum spent about $6 million to host the exhibit and had to hire about 90 extra, temporary staff.

The real challenge with the scrolls was that they were so fragile, Brooks-Gonyer said. If there was a fire, for example, they could not really be moved.

The scrolls were shipped in fire-proof containers, and the museum had to develop a special plan whereby if the fire alarm sounded, the security team would have to respond to the scrolls before anything else, and cover them with specially made fire-proof blankets, to protect them from flames and water damage from the sprinkler system.

The scrolls came to the museum by courier, and the dates of shipment and arrival were kept secret, even to the San Diego museum. It just had to be ready to accept them when they came, whenever that might be.

Once the scrolls were installed, each one on display had its own surveillance camera. There was 24-hour monitoring of those cameras, and during the off hours the room with the scrolls was locked and access was strictly regulated.

After all those preparations, all the museum officials could do was hope they had done enough, and brace themselves for the crowds that came to see, including 40,000 who bought tickets before it even opened.

“You couldn’t insure the value of those things,” he said. “We certainly did, but I’m sure if anything happened to them, the value is really incalculable. But it was fascinating.”