CHAPTER 2 Survey of the Manuscripts The eleven caves at Qumran have yielded the remains of approximately eight hundred manuscripts. It seems likely that many of them were copied or written at Qumran, but certainly not all of them were. A few of them can be dated on paleographical grounds to the third or early second century B.C., well before Roland de Vaux’s phase Ia. They must have been brought to the site from elsewhere. The same may be true for many others; unfortunately, it is difficult to tell