99 Fun Facts About Dead Sea

Which city just north-west of the Dead Sea is among the oldest continuously settled places on Earth?

Jericho grew up around a copious spring, which drew settlers so early that by about 8000 BCE they had ringed the town with a stone wall and tower.

Josephus says which preacher was imprisoned and executed at Machaerus, a fortress above the Dead Sea?

John the Baptist was held in the fortress by Herod Antipas, who, Josephus writes, feared the preacher's hold on the crowds could raise a rebellion and had him put to death.

What is the Dead Sea's main tributary?

The Jordan River flows south out of the Sea of Galilee and ends in the Dead Sea, which has no outlet, so the water it brings can leave only by evaporating.

As of 2025, roughly how far below sea level is the surface of the Dead Sea?

At about 440 metres below sea level in 2025, the Dead Sea's shore is the lowest land on Earth, and the record keeps moving: the surface drops by roughly a metre a year.

Compared with ordinary seawater, the Dead Sea is roughly how much saltier?

About tenfold: the brine is roughly one-third salt by weight, and its deep water is so saturated that salt crystallises out and settles on the lake bed.

Why can anyone float effortlessly in the Dead Sea?

The water's high density, about 1.24 kg per litre, comes from the salt dissolved in it, so a bather's body is lighter than the brine it pushes aside and cannot sink.

What is potash, the chief mineral product of the Dead Sea, mainly used to make?

Fertiliser takes most of the world's potash because crops need its potassium to grow; the Dead Sea firms win it by letting the sun evaporate brine in shallow pans.

Why is the Dead Sea called 'dead'?

Almost nothing can live in it: fish swept in by floods die quickly in the brine, and only salt-loving bacteria and fungi survive.

What is the ancient trail that climbs the eastern face of Masada called?

The Snake Path twists so tightly up the cliff that climbers once had to go single file; visitors can now ride a cable car to the top instead.

Yam HaMelah, the Dead Sea's name in the Bible and in modern Hebrew, translates as what?

Sea of Salt is the lake's name in the Hebrew text, which never calls it 'dead': that name comes from later Greek and Latin writers.

Greek and Roman geographers named the Dead Sea after which substance that floats up in it?

Asphalt still rises in black lumps from seeps in the lake bed, and the ancient Egyptians bought it to embalm their mummies, so the classical world called the water Lake Asphaltites.

The Dead Sea's Arabic name, 'Sea of Lot', refers to whose nephew?

Abraham was Lot's uncle: Genesis has the two part ways after their herdsmen quarrel, with Lot choosing the well-watered plain where tradition sets the lake.

Which UNESCO site just north of the Dead Sea is venerated as the place of Jesus's baptism?

Al-Maghtas, on the river's east bank, drew pilgrims and hermits from Roman times: digs have found their churches, cave cells and the pools where baptisms were held.

The Dead Sea lies on the boundary between which two tectonic plates?

The African and Arabian plates meet here along the Dead Sea Transform, and the strip of crust caught between its faults has sunk, which is why the lake's basin lies so far below sea level.

Which ridge of rock salt rises along the Dead Sea's south-western shore?

Mount Sodom is salt squeezed up from the valley floor by the weight of the sediment above it; one weathered pillar on its flank is nicknamed Lot's wife.

Millions of years ago, the Dead Sea valley was a long lagoon fed by which sea?

The Mediterranean reached inland through today's Jezreel Valley, and each time the lagoon dried out it left salt behind, building beds about two kilometres thick.

The Dead Sea is the last remnant of a much larger prehistoric body of water known by what name?

Lake Lisan filled the valley in the last ice age, then shrank and grew saltier as the climate dried and evaporation outran the rain, leaving the Dead Sea behind.

What Köppen climate type does the Dead Sea have?

Hot desert: only about 5 cm of rain falls in a year, and the basin lies so low and sheltered that winters stay mild and frost never comes.

Why is there slightly more oxygen to breathe on the Dead Sea's shore than at sea level?

Higher air pressure: the shore lies so far below sea level that extra atmosphere presses down on it, packing a few percent more oxygen into every breath.

Which metal's chloride makes up about half of the Dead Sea's dissolved salt, unlike the ocean's sodium salt?

Magnesium chloride made up about half the lake's salt in a 1980s analysis, against under a third for sodium chloride, and it is what gives the water its loathsome, bitter taste.

Dead Sea brine is exceptionally rich in which ion, the basis of a chemical industry on its shores?

Bromide makes up about 0.4 percent of the brine, dozens of times its level in the ocean, so plants on both shores extract bromine from the lake.

What happened to the Dead Sea's water column in the winter of 1978-79?

Its two layers mixed into one: the upper layer had grown saltier than the deep water, so when it cooled that winter it sank, and the lake overturned for the first time in centuries.

After an unusually rainy winter, the Dead Sea has been known to turn which colour?

Red: the rain dilutes the surface brine enough for an alga to bloom, and the salt-loving microbes that feed on it carry a red pigment that tints the whole lake.

Sunbathing cures at the Dead Sea, where the air filters ultraviolet light, are best known for treating which skin condition?

Psoriasis: the thick air over the lake filters out much of the sun's burning UVB, so patients can lie in the sun for far longer than they could elsewhere.

In Genesis 14, the kings of which two cities are routed in a battle in the Dead Sea valley?

Sodom and Gomorrah were plundered after the rout, Genesis says, and Lot was carried off with the spoils until a night raid won him back.

According to the Book of Samuel, where beside the Dead Sea did David hide from King Saul?

Ein Gedi: the Book of Samuel has Saul step into the very cave where David was hiding, and David, urged to kill him, only cut a corner from the king's robe.

Which people monopolised the Dead Sea's trade in the Hellenistic period?

The Nabateans, Arab traders based at Petra, gathered what the lake cast up and sold it on to Egypt, a trade that Greek and Jewish writers say they kept to themselves.

Which king built the lavish palaces of Masada above the Dead Sea's western shore?

Herod the Great made Masada his bolt-hole, Josephus says, fearing both a revolt by his own subjects and the ambitions of Cleopatra, and he stocked it with food and weapons.

Per Josephus, how many Masada defenders died by suicide when the Roman siege ended in 73/74 CE?

Josephus puts the dead at 960 men, women and children; the only survivors, he says, were two women and five children who had hidden in an underground water channel.

How did the Roman commander Vespasian test the Dead Sea's buoyancy?

He threw in bound non-swimmers: men who could not swim were thrown in with their hands tied, Josephus records, and all bobbed up as if a wind had forced them upwards.

Which ascetic Jewish sect is widely thought to have lived at Qumran on the Dead Sea's western shore?

The Essenes are tied to Qumran largely because the Roman writer Pliny the Elder placed the celibate sect on the lake's western shore, though some scholars still dispute the link.

Who stumbled on the first Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near Qumran in the winter of 1946-47?

Bedouin shepherds found the scrolls in clay jars and carried them to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer, who promptly sent them back to the cliffs to look for more.

Which Israel Museum building in Jerusalem houses the major Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Shrine of the Book was built to recall the jars in which the first scrolls were found, and its scrolls take turns on display so that none sits in the light for more than a few months.

Masada's 2001 UNESCO listing cites the most complete surviving example of what?

Its Roman siege works, the camps, wall and assault ramp ringing the rock, survive because the site is so remote and harsh that it lay abandoned and untouched for some thirteen centuries.

The Madaba Map, a floor mosaic that shows boats crossing the Dead Sea, dates from which period?

Byzantine: the map was laid as a church floor in Madaba in the sixth century and lay forgotten until workers building a new church on the ruins uncovered it in the 1880s.

Which crop was cultivated on the Dead Sea's shores from the Crusader period, peaking under the Mamluks?

Sugarcane was milled where it grew: the ruins of medieval sugar factories still stand at Ghor es-Safi, just beyond the lake's southern end.

Lieutenant William Lynch sailed down the river and charted the Dead Sea in 1848 for which country's navy?

The United States Navy sent Lynch's party, which hauled two metal boats overland by camel, shot the river's 27 rapids and went on to survey the lake itself.

In 1883 Moses Shapira offered scroll strips said to come from near the Dead Sea for sale to which institution?

The British Museum was asked for £1 million and put two strips on show while its expert studied them; once they were denounced as fakes Shapira fled London, and he took his own life in a Rotterdam hotel in 1884.

The Palestine Potash Company supplied half of which country's potash in World War II?

Britain governed Palestine under a mandate and had granted the company its concession to work the lake's minerals.

In 1968 the Dead Sea Works became a subsidiary of which state-founded holding company?

Israel Chemicals was set up in 1968 as a state holding company for the Dead Sea Works and its sister mineral firms, and passed to private control in 1995.

What is the chief reason the Dead Sea has been shrinking rapidly since the 1960s?

Diversion of its main river: Israel's National Water Carrier, finished in 1964, and other schemes upstream cut an inflow of about 1.3 billion cubic metres a year to a small fraction of that.

What is causing the large sinkholes appearing along the Dead Sea's western shore?

Fresh groundwater dissolving salt layers: as the lake drops, brine drains out of the ground near the shore, fresh water flows in behind it and eats cavities in buried salt until the surface caves in.

The plan to refill the Dead Sea with brine piped from which body of water was abandoned in 2021?

Red Sea: the pipeline from near Aqaba was meant to desalinate seawater for drinking and send the leftover brine on to the lake, but the scheme was dropped without ever breaking ground.

Letters found in a cave above the Dead Sea were sent by which leader of a second-century revolt against Rome?

Simon bar Kokhba's orders to his officers lay in a cliffside cave where refugees from his failed revolt had hidden, beside one local woman's bundle of legal papers.

What did scuba-diving scientists discover on the floor of the Dead Sea in the early 2010s?

Freshwater fissures ringed by microbes: springs well up through the lake bed, and around them the divers found dense films of bacteria and archaea, far richer than anything in the open brine.

Where are most of Israel's Dead Sea hotels concentrated?

Ein Bokek, on the southern shore, has had hotels since the 1960s, yet the water its guests float in is no longer open lake: the southern basin has been diked into evaporation ponds.

What did excavators find at Qumran that suggests scrolls were written on the spot?

Inkwells turned up beside plastered tables in a room the excavator named the scriptorium, and Qumran has since yielded more of them than any other site of its era.

From which mountain east of the Dead Sea did Moses view the Promised Land before dying?

Mount Nebo is where Deuteronomy has Moses shown the whole land and told he will never enter it; he dies there, and no one, the book adds, knows his grave.

Highway 90, which follows the Dead Sea's western shore, ends in the north at Israel's border with which country?

Lebanon: the road runs the length of the country, from Metula on the Lebanese border to Eilat, and beside the Dead Sea sinkholes have forced a stretch of it to be closed and bypassed.

Which Greek philosopher wrote of a 'fabled' lake in Palestine, the Dead Sea, where neither man nor beast sinks?

Aristotle never saw it: his Meteorology passes on the tale as hearsay to support his argument that salt thickens water, adding that clothes soaked and shaken in the lake came out clean.

Don Juan Pond, a small lake even saltier than the Dead Sea, lies on which continent?

Antarctica: the shallow pond in the Dry Valleys is so loaded with calcium chloride that it stays liquid even at around 50 degrees below zero.

What did the British build at Kalia and name after two doomed biblical cities?

A golf course kept Mandate officials amused beside the potash works at Kalia, the first plant to draw minerals from the lake by letting its brine dry in the sun.

The Talmud warns that 'Sodomite salt' from the Dead Sea, left on the fingers, could cause what?

Blindness: the Talmud says even a grain rubbed into the eye could blind, which is the reason it gives for the custom of washing the hands after a meal.

Which prophet's book foretells that the Dead Sea's waters will one day be healed and turn fresh?

Ezekiel 47 has a river flow from the Temple down to the sea and heal its waters, so that fishermen stand along the shore spreading their nets.

During the First Temple period, which kingdom held the Dead Sea's eastern shore?

Moab held the plateau above the eastern shore, where its king Mesha set up a basalt stele boasting of his victories over Israel; a missionary found the stone there in 1868.

Josephus says doctors lowered a dying king, fresh from hot springs by the Dead Sea, into a tub of warm what?

Oil: the king had crossed to the springs of Callirrhoe hoping for a cure, and the bath went so badly that he seemed to be dying and revived only at his servants' cries.

Which monastery in the Kidron gorge, west of the Dead Sea, was founded in the fifth century and still houses monks?

Mar Saba grew up around the cave of the hermit Sabbas and still keeps one of its oldest rules: women may come no further than a tower outside the walls.

The Dead Sea's aridity is blamed on the rain shadow of which range?

The Judaean Mountains to the west catch the rain blowing in from the coast, leaving the lake in their shadow; the highlands east of it get more rain than the shore does.

Which of these is a name the Hebrew Bible uses for the Dead Sea?

The Eastern Sea is what the prophets call it, because the lake marked the eastern edge of the land, just as the 'Great Sea' on the coast marked the west.

Archaeologists announced a twelfth scroll cave near Qumran in 2017; what did they find inside it?

Broken jars but no scrolls: pickaxes left on the floor suggest that looters emptied the cave in the 1950s, leaving behind a single blank scrap of parchment.

The peninsula that once divided the Dead Sea's two basins is named from the Arabic word for what?

Tongue: the spit once poked out into open water, but the falling lake has left it high and dry, a land bridge that now cuts the Dead Sea in two.

Explorer Christopher Costigan, honoured by a cape on the Dead Sea, died in 1835 from what?

Heat and thirst: Costigan set out in August, the hottest time of year, with too little fresh water, and within days he was too ill to row; the fever that followed killed him.

Which Crusader lord of Kerak, east of the Dead Sea, did Saladin execute after Hattin in 1187?

Raynald of Châtillon had broken a truce by raiding a caravan from his castle at Kerak, the act that brought on Saladin's invasion; captured at Hattin, he was beheaded by the sultan himself.

Josephus wrote that fruit growing beside the Dead Sea turned to what when picked?

Smoke and ashes, he wrote; the tale clings to a real shrub whose air-filled fruit bursts with a puff when squeezed.

A grocery store beside the Dead Sea installed which device, which now holds a world record?

A cash machine: no bank put it there; a shop at one of the hotel resorts installed it on its own initiative, and it now holds the title of the lowest ATM on Earth.

Which Israeli town, founded in 1962 on the heights west of the Dead Sea, housed the area's first big hotels?

Arad was founded by young former kibbutz members looking for a home free of crowding, noise and pollution, and the first large hotels for visitors to the lake were built there.

Wadi Mujib, the canyon river that enters the Dead Sea from the east, was known in the Bible as which stream?

Arnon: the Bible names this gorge as the frontier between the kingdoms east of the lake, and King Mesha's ninth-century stele boasts of building a road along it.

About 15 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written not in Hebrew but in which language?

Aramaic was the common language of the Near East in that era, so tales such as Enoch and Tobit circulated in it; only a handful of the scrolls are in Greek.

The Dead Sea cosmetics firm Ahava began after a spa technician watched women tourists doing what?

Scooping up mud: Ziva Gilad saw visitors carrying the black mineral mud home, and in 1988 Ahava opened as a single stand selling bottles of body scrub.

In 2015 the Dead Sea cosmetics firm Ahava agreed to be bought by a conglomerate from which country?

China's Fosun International, a Shanghai conglomerate, valued the company at about $77 million, a long way from the single tourist stand it had started from in 1988.

Boycott campaigns have targeted the Dead Sea cosmetics firm Ahava because its main factory stood where?

The West Bank: the plant stood at Mitzpe Shalem, a kibbutz settlement on the lake's north-western shore, so campaigners argued that its creams drew on the resources of occupied land.

Unlike the other Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll is not a religious text but a list of what?

Buried treasure: its entries give directions to dozens of caches of gold and silver, and the last one points to a second copy of the list, which has never turned up.

The corroded Copper Scroll was cut into 23 strips in 1955–56 in which English city?

Manchester: the corroded metal could not be unrolled, so on John Allegro's advice it was sent to the city's College of Technology, where a professor cut it into strips that could be read.

Unlike most of the scrolls, the Copper Scroll is displayed in a museum in which city?

Amman: the scroll was already in a museum there in 1967, when Israel captured the East Jerusalem museum that held most of the other fragments, so it never changed hands.

Which book of the Hebrew Bible is the only one not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Esther is absent from all eleven caves; one theory holds that Qumran's calendar had no place for Purim, another that a Jewish queen wed to a Persian king was frowned upon.

Tiny parchment slips found in the Qumran caves were made to be worn inside which ritual objects?

Tefillin: the slips carry Torah verses and were folded into small capsules bound to the arm and forehead at prayer; about two dozen of them survived in the caves.

In June 1954, four Dead Sea Scrolls were advertised for sale in which newspaper?

The Wall Street Journal carried the advert, placed by an archbishop who had smuggled the four scrolls to New Jersey; Yigael Yadin quietly bought them through an American middleman for the State of Israel.

The rare red ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls was made from cinnabar, an ore of which metal?

Mercury: cinnabar is mercury sulphide, and its vivid red appears only four times in the whole collection; the everyday black ink was nothing grander than soot from olive oil lamps.

Which numbered cave at Qumran held by far the largest share of the scroll fragments?

Cave 4 lies in plain view of the Qumran ruins, yet it went unnoticed until 1952, five years after the first finds, and proved to hold the main deposit of the whole library.

At over eight metres, which is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Temple Scroll, from Cave 11, runs to more than eight metres and is written as God's own words to Moses, setting out the plan of an ideal Temple in Jerusalem.

Mar Samuel, who acquired four of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, was a Metropolitan of which church?

Syriac Orthodox: Samuel bought the four scrolls from a dealer for his Jerusalem monastery of St Mark, and when war came he smuggled them out to one of his church's parishes in New Jersey.

From 1993, which US agency's imaging revealed illegible text on Dead Sea Scroll fragments?

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory photographed unreadable fragments in infrared light, and words no eye could make out stood clear; one newly readable scrap says 'He wrote the words of Noah'.

In 2020, which US institution admitted all 16 of its scroll fragments were forgeries?

The Museum of the Bible in Washington had already pulled five fragments from display in 2018 after outside scholars raised doubts; by March 2020 testing showed that all 16 were modern fakes.

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls surfaced, which codex was among the oldest known Hebrew Bible manuscripts?

The Aleppo Codex dates from the tenth century, a thousand years after the scrolls; in 1947, the year they surfaced, rioters burned its synagogue, and when it reappeared about 40 percent of its pages were gone.

Khalil 'Kando' Shahin, the Bethlehem dealer behind the first Dead Sea Scrolls, was by trade a what?

A cobbler: Kando mended shoes in Bethlehem and dealt in antiquities on the side, and he sold the scrolls that came his way to the head of a Jerusalem monastery.

Which Roman governor led the Tenth Legion's siege of Masada?

Lucius Flavius Silva had to feed his army in a wilderness with no spring nearby, so Jewish prisoners were set to hauling its food and water from far away.

Geologists found the Roman assault ramp at Masada consists mostly of what?

A natural spur of bedrock forms most of the ramp: geologist Dan Gill showed in 1993 that the Romans only had to top an existing rock rib with fill, far less work than the legend of a hand-built ramp suggests.

Despite Josephus's suicide tale, remains of at most how many people were found at Masada?

Only 28 sets of remains were found: three in the northern palace and 25 in a cave below the southern wall, where pig bones hint they may have been Romans rather than rebels.

A 2,000-year-old date seed from Masada was sprouted and nicknamed after which patriarch?

Methuselah sprouted in 2005 from a seed dug up at Masada in the 1960s; the tree is male, and it has since pollinated a female palm raised from another ancient seed, which went on to bear dates.

Which IDF chief of staff began swearing in armoured corps recruits atop Masada?

Moshe Dayan began the torchlit ceremony, which closed with the vow 'Masada shall not fall again'; the army has since taken to holding such oaths at other sites as well.

Which electronic musician staged a concert beside Masada in 2017?

Jean-Michel Jarre played at the foot of Masada to draw attention to the shrinking Dead Sea, billing the show as a protest against Donald Trump's environmental policies.

In 1900 the Palestine Exploration Fund carved a line into a rock at Ein Feshkha to track what?

The Dead Sea's water level: a stonemason cut the line 14 feet above the surface, and a researcher came down from Jerusalem twice a year until 1913 to measure the gap.

Which wild mountain goat lives on the cliffs on both sides of the Dead Sea?

The Nubian ibex was hunted until it became threatened, and it now holds on in the reserves on both shores, where herds pick their way along the cliffs above the water.

Excavator Roland de Vaux identified Qumran with which place listed in the Book of Joshua?

The City of Salt was de Vaux's pick from the wilderness towns of Joshua 15; others prefer Secacah, from the same list, because the Copper Scroll describes waterworks there that match Qumran's.

The northern palace at Masada is famous for being built in what way?

On terraces down the cliff: the 'hanging palace' steps down the northern prow of the rock in three levels, part of the works that turned a barren summit into a lavish royal retreat.

Seen from Jerusalem, the land across the Dead Sea fault has slid about 105 km over millions of years in which direction?

North: both sides of the fault are drifting north, but the far side moves faster, and the difference has carried it about 105 km past the land on the Jerusalem side.

19th-century British officers first proposed a shipping route through the Dead Sea in order to bypass what?

The Suez Canal was the rival: in 1855 Captain William Allen proposed a 'new route to India' through the lake, unaware that it lies far below sea level.

Excavators at Masada found potsherds, each bearing a single name, that may have been used for what?

Drawing lots among the defenders: Josephus says ten men were picked by lot to kill the rest, and one of the eleven sherds reads 'ben Ya'ir', perhaps the rebels' commander.

Bab edh-Dhra, an Early Bronze Age town above the Dead Sea, is best known to archaeologists for its vast what?

A cemetery: an estimated 20,000 shaft tombs were dug there before the town even had walls, and later generations stacked their dead in mudbrick houses nicknamed 'body libraries'.