The Dead Sea Scrolls are often described as the most important archaeological find of the 20th century. These 2000 years old manuscripts have great religious, historical and linguistic importance. The fact that large parts of these texts are obscured by the darkening of the parchment is extremely unfortunate. In our previous research we explored the possible causes of parchment browning or darkening using artificial aging, which allowed both destructive and non-destructive testing. Our results could be summarized as two main theories, one related to parchment fibers flattening and changing the way light is reflected, the second related to the formation of strong brown pigments, likely from the melanoidin family. Here we examine the scrolls themselves and discuss their degradation in light of these theories. The main DSS collection could only be surveyed by completely non-destructive means, namely multispectral imaging and Diffuse Reflected Infrared Fourier Transform (DRIFT); however, a few fragments were examined by micro-destructive means including SEM and FTIR-ATR and EPR. Despite the great variation between scrolls, we demonstrate that the browning of the scrolls and their degradation fits within the framework of those theories developed on artificially aged samples. We suggest the extreme degradation occurred when parchment was exposed to water and particularly if that water was slow to evaporate, for example saturated salt water which is slow to evaporate, and was very likely present in the caves where the scrolls were found by the Dead Sea. Hydrolysis and denaturation freed the necessary components to meet and initiate the formation of large melanoidins.

死海古卷经常被描述为20世纪最重要的考古发现。这些已有2000年历史的手稿在宗教，历史和语言上都具有重要意义。这些文本的大部分被羊皮纸变黑所掩盖的事实是非常不幸的。在我们以前的研究中，我们探索了使用人工时效使羊皮纸变褐或变黑的可能原因，这可以进行破坏性和非破坏性测试。我们的结果可以归纳为两个主要理论，一个理论涉及羊皮纸纤维变平和改变光的反射方式，第二个理论涉及可能来自黑色素家族的强棕色颜料的形成。在这里，我们检查卷轴本身，并根据这些理论讨论卷轴的退化。DSS的主要收集只能通过完全无损的手段进行调查，即多光谱成像和漫反射红外傅里叶变换（DRIFT）；但是，通过显微破坏手段（包括SEM，FTIR-ATR和EPR）检查了一些碎片。尽管卷轴之间存在很大差异，但我们证明了卷轴的褐变及其降解符合在人工时效样品上发展的那些理论的框架。我们建议当羊皮纸暴露于水中时会发生极端退化，尤其是当水缓慢蒸发时，例如饱和盐水，其缓慢蒸发，并且很可能存在于死海发现涡卷的洞穴中。