New Dead Sea Scrolls cave discovered. No new scrolls, but a 12th cave that held scrolls until a few decades ago, probably looted in the 1950s. The first Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in 1947, on the modern-day West Bank. They date from as early as the 4th Century BC, over 800 documents in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, containing the oldest copies of many biblical texts and secular writings about life in the 1st and 2nd Centuries AD.