1,900-year-old papyrus 'best-documented Roman court case from Judaea apart from the trial of Jesus'

An orange-colored parchment is fragmented and covered in Greek letters.

Researchers have finally deciphered a 1,900-year-old scroll describing a tense court case during the Roman occupation of Israel. The finding reveals more about criminal cases from the time and answers a longstanding question about slave ownership in the region.

In 2014, a researcher organizing papyri in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority's storeroom made a surprising discovery: the longest Greek papyrus ever found in the Judaean desert.