Dead Sea Scroll breakthrough: AI analysis proves the ancient manuscripts are even OLDER than we thought

Daily Mail​

5 days ago

The Dead Sea Scrolls are surely among the most historically and biblically important objects known to humankind.
Found in caves near the Dead Sea nearly 100 years ago, these ancient manuscripts have transformed understanding of Jewish and Christian origins.
Penned upon the 1,000 scrolls were profound religious texts, hymns, prayers, legal codes, commentaries and more.
Until now, the scrolls have been assumed to date somewhere between the third century BC and the first century AD.
But according to a new AI analysis, some of the scrolls date back as far as the fourth century BC – nearly 2,500 years ago.
While the experts only analysed about a tenth of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, they hope AI could continue to reveal more about their history.
'Often individual manuscript dates are older than previously thought,' lead study author Professor Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen told MailOnline.
'The strength and significance of the AI tool that we have developed is that it makes it possible to provide much more accurate date estimates.'
First found in 1946 in the Qumran Caves of the Judaean Desert, near the Dead Sea, the scrolls comprise around 1,000 ancient manuscripts in thousands of fragments.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were made of parchment from processed animal hide known as vellum, but also plant matter called papyrus and sheets of metal.
The text upon them was penned in four languages – Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean (language of the ancient Arab Nabatean people).
But their religious significance is largely because the scrolls include some early Hebrew texts that would go on to form part of the Old Testament of the Bible.
Little has been known about the scribe or scribes who laboured to produce the individual scrolls – as the works were not signed.
It is sometimes possible to determine the approximate age of undated manuscripts by evaluating handwriting – but to use this method, there needs to be enough manuscripts with accurate dates to create a reliable timeline of handwriting styles.
For the study, researchers used radiocarbon dating to work out the age of historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank.
They then then used a previously-developed AI neural network called BiNet to study the handwriting styles of each document, right down to the ink-trace patterns.
How old are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Until now, the scrolls have been assumed to date somewhere between the third century BC and the first century AD.
But according to the study, some of the scrolls date back as far as the fourth century BC - nearly 2,500 years ago.
The ancient manuscripts that were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near Khirbet Qumran, on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea.
By pairing those two datasets together, the team could create an AI program called 'Enoch' that could use the handwriting style of other manuscripts from the region to objectively determine an approximate age range – including the Dead Sea Scrolls.
To test the program, ancient handwriting experts evaluated Enoch's age estimates for 135 of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The experts determined that 79 per cent of the AI's estimates were 'realistic', while the remaining 21 per cent were determined too old, too young or indecisive.
Crucially, both the AI and radiocarbon dating methods estimated older ages for many of the Dead Sea Scrolls than did traditional handwriting analysis.
'In general, the date predictions by Enoch for individual manuscripts moves within the timeframe of late fourth century BC until second century AD,' Professor Popović told MailOnline.
'But within that time frame more manuscripts are now older, being dated to the first half of the second century BC, the third century BC and in two cases even into the late fourth century BC.'
Professor Popović said his team 'have not yet dated all manuscripts', so potentially more is to be learned about the overall age of the scrolls.
'There are more than 1,000 Dead Sea Scrolls so our study is a first but significant step, opening a door unto history with new possibilities for research,' he said.
Until now, the dating of individual manuscripts was mostly based on 'palaeography' – the study of ancient handwriting alone.
But the new study, published in the journal PLOS One, combines palaeography with AI and radiocarbon dating to get a fuller picture.
Enoch also gives researchers a powerful new tool that can refine estimates for specific manuscripts, often to an accuracy of only plus or minus 50 years.
The authors say: 'With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible.
'It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history.'
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1946 and 1956 and date back 2,000 years
Discovered between 1946 and 1956, the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient manuscripts dating back to 2,000 years ago - or more.
The texts include tends of thousands of parchment and papyrus fragments and in rare cases entire manuscripts.
They contain parts of what is now known as the Hebrew Bible as well as a range of extra-biblical documents.
The scrolls were found by shepherd Muhammed Edh-Dhib as he searched for a stray among the limestone cliffs at Khirbet Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea in what was then British Mandate Palestine - now the West Bank.
The story goes that in a cave in the dark crevice of a steep rocky hillside, Muhammed hurled a stone into the dark interior and was startled to hear the sound of breaking pots.
Venturing inside, the young Bedouin found a mysterious collection of large clay jars in which he found old scrolls, some wrapped in linen and blackened with age.
The texts have since been excavated by archaeologists, who are now racing to digitise their contents before they deteriorate beyond legibility.
The texts are of great historical and religious significance and include the earliest known surviving copies of biblical and extra-biblical documents, as well as preserving evidence of diversity in late Second Temple Judaism.