Age of Dead Sea Scrolls pushed back by new AI study

Australia Broadcast Center

4 days ago

The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most significant troves of religious manuscripts ever found, with many being the oldest surviving copies of biblical texts.
First found by a Bedouin shepherd, the hundreds of ancient scrolls — excavated from the Qumran caves, in the West Bank, between 1946 and 1956 — have been a boon to those studying the history of Judaism and Christianity.
But while we know the scrolls are all between 2,500 and 1,800 years old, just a fraction have dates written on them indicating when they were first composed.
Figuring out the ages of the other scrolls can help scholars to understand how Judaism evolved, and which scripts and ideas were important at different times.
Now an international team of researchers has aimed to fill some gaps in the Dead Sea Scrolls' timeline using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), carbon dating and handwriting analysis.
In the journal PLOS One, they proposed new ages for more than 100 scroll fragments, and found many to be older than previously thought.
Gareth Wearne, a researcher in biblical studies and the history of ancient Israel at Australian Catholic University, said the research could change our understanding of the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"It potentially has implications for how we think about how the material came to be copied and disseminated at the beginning of the process that ultimately led to them being included in the biblical canon," Dr Wearne, who was not involved with the study, said.
Radiocarbon dating is often relied on in archaeology to find the age of an artefact, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are no exception.
But the technique is vulnerable to contamination, and often yields imprecise results, particularly for the period when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written: there are fewer artefacts with known dates to calibrate the scrolls' age against.
Plus, as University of Groningen archaeologist and study lead author Mladen Popović pointed out, "radiocarbon dating is a destructive method".
Researchers now only need a few thousandths of a gram of material to carbon-date it, but artefacts with the cultural importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls are incredibly precious.
Another common technique used to study the scrolls is palaeography, or the study of handwriting, which looks at the way scripts have changed over centuries.
But this method is also vulnerable to inaccuracies.
So researchers such as Professor Popović and his colleagues have looked for ways to date the scrolls when other methods fall short.
In their new study, the team carbon dated 24 Dead Sea Scroll samples.
The researchers fed digital images of the 24 dated scrolls into a machine learning model — a type of AI — which was designed to analyse the handwriting in the scrolls.
They then had the AI predict the ages of 135 other scrolls, based on their handwriting and scripts.
The researchers named their AI model Enoch, after a figure depicted in the book of Genesis who they deemed a "science hero".
Enoch's predictions, and the carbon dated samples, found many of the scrolls were older than previously thought — sometimes by decades, sometimes by a few years.
The study suggested two of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be texts contemporary to when they were first written, or close to it.
One scroll, which contains a fragment from the book of Daniel, was carbon dated to between 230 and 160 BC — up to 100 years older than previous estimates.
This means it overlaps with when the text was believed to be written, based on historical events it refers to.
Another scroll, containing text from Ecclesiastes, was dated with the Enoch AI to the third century BC.
The text had previously thought to have been created roughly in the mid-second century BC based on how it aligned with the cultural movements of the era.
If the dating is correct, these two fragments would be the first-known examples of biblical texts from the time when the work was composed.
Expert palaeographers checked the AI's results, and found 79 per cent of them to be realistic predictions.
Dr Wearne said the findings were "the single greatest step forward since the development of the original, conventional dating system" in the 1940s.
"It then requires us to think about the social and the historical context in which the scrolls were produced in new ways."
Andrea Jalandoni, an archaeologist at Griffith University who wasn't involved with the research, said the addition of other techniques strengthened the reliability of the AI.
"They've pinned it with radiocarbon and then evaluated it with expert palaeographers," Dr Jalandoni said.
But, she said, the AI model was trained on a small sample size, which could complicate its reliability.
Professor Popović plans to apply the Enoch model to more Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as other ancient Aramaic texts like the Elephantine Papyri.
"The techniques and methods we developed are applicable to other handwritten [collections of text]," he said.
Dr Jalandoni, who studies rock art in Australia and South-East Asia, said the study gave her ideas for her own research.
"I was looking at this and thinking: 'Wow, I wonder if I can do this with rock art,'" Dr Jalandoni said.
"We have some dates for rock art, but not a lot."
Australian rock art has very little carbon in it, making carbon dating a fruitless task so archaeologists have to rely on other dating methods.
"If we could … create a machine learning model that can predict dates that line up with more methods, I think it's the way to go," Dr Jalandoni said.