Attendance at the Royal Ontario Museum's Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World exhibition has exceeded even its organizers' most hopeful projections, attracting an average of more than 2,000 people each day since it opened.
In the nine days after the Toronto exhibition opened on June 27, 18,324 people attended, exceeding the museum's projections by 52 per cent, the ROM announced yesterday. And the ROM will hope to draw return visitors, as the 16 scrolls to be displayed are split between two three-month stints, the second of which begins in October. Dating as far back as the third century BC, but discovered just 60 years ago, the Scrolls include the oldest known examples of the Hebrew Bible as well as other religious and secular texts.
The ROM also said in a statement that overall museum attendance is on pace with earlier projections, at more than 242,000 since April 1.
James Bradshaw