Latest news with #MladenPopovic
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
New Evidence Rewrites the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: A scholar from the Netherlands used AI to determine that the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously believed. The new AI model pairs handwriting data with radiocarbon dating information to date ancient manuscripts. In the future, scientists hope the model will be useful in dating other mysterious ancient texts Dating ancient artifacts is very difficult. Experts have a number of techniques they can use to get close, but there are limitations that often can't be overcome without additional information. That said, sometimes you get lucky, like the researchers investigating the famous Dead Sea Scrolls did when they realized that the author wrote the dates of creation directly on several of the pages. However, not every scroll was labeled, and as a result, the undated Dead Sea Scrolls have been much harder for scientists to pin down. But when new technologies arise, things can change. According to a new study—in which scientists used AI modeling to study handwriting styles across ancient manuscripts with known dates—some of the undated Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously believed. Mladen Popovic (from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands) and his research team claim that their work not only re-dates some Dead Sea Scrolls, but could open a new way to place undated manuscripts on the timeline of ancient history. The team published their findings in the open-access journal PLOS One. 'It is very exciting to set a significant step in solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscripts from history,' the authors wrote in a statement. 'This would not have been possible without the collaboration between so many different scientific disciplines.' The process started with a bounty of ancient texts used to help build datasets. The team parsed through historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank and used radiocarbon dating to estimate the ages of the documents. The team then trained a machine-learning model to understand the handwriting styles of each document in direct relation to the historic date of the manuscript. The AI model—dubbed Enoch, after the prominent biblical figure—then merged the two datasets. The goal of the work is to be able to 'objectively determine an approximate age range' of a manuscript based solely on the handwriting style on the document. During testing, the scholars said that Enoch's age estimates for the 135 Dead Sea Scrolls were 'realistic' 79 percent of the time, and non-realistic 21 percent of the time (non-realistic here meaning significantly too old, significantly too young, or indecisive). The Enoch model, paired with radiocarbon dating, estimates older ages for 'many of the Dead Sea Scrolls' than traditional handwriting analysis methods. The authors said that more data and further research could help pinpoint the timelines. '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,' the authors wrote in the statement, 'especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors.' You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
AI analysis says Dead Sea Scrolls are older than thought
June 7 (UPI) -- The ancient Dead Sea Scrolls likely are much older than originally thought, a new artificial intelligence analysis suggests. The scrolls could be centuries older than initially thought, according to a study that combined radiocarbon dating with AI to better analyze the remnants of ancient documents, The Times of Israel reported. "The Dead Sea Scrolls ... completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity," said Mladen Popovic, lead author of the study that was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. "Out of 1,000 manuscripts, a bit more than 200 are what we call biblical Old Testament," Popovic told CNN. "They are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible." Popovic is the dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Archaeologists recovered thousands of remnants of scrolls that were first discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert by Bedouin shepherds in an area that has become the West Bank. Instead of dating the scrolls based on the form of their lettering, researchers used carbon dating to analyze samples from 30 of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were provided by the Israel Antiquities Authority. They also created high-resolution copies of the scripts and used an AI-powered model called "Enoch" to analyze the textual characters contained in 135 scrolls. The study revealed the scrolls are older than initially thought, which is from the 3rd century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. A paleographic study of the text within the scrolls narrowed their origin to that timeframe in 1961, but little else was done to analyze their origin until now. The new study pretreated pieces of parchment to remove any chemical traces from prior studies before undertaking carbon dating, and AI analysis corroborates the results. It suggests some of the scrolls were one or two centuries older than originally thought, including Old Testament books like Ecclesiastes. The study also suggests literacy was much more widespread in the region. "These manuscripts are not just the earliest copy of these [Old Testament] books that survived," IAA Dead Sea Scrolls Unit leader Joe Uziel told The Times of Israel. They are "one of the oldest copies of these compositions ever written," he said. Only about 10% of the scrolls were studied, which Popovic said means there is a lot more to learn through more studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
DW
4 days ago
- Science
- DW
Dead Sea Scrolls older than previously thought says AI – DW – 06/04/2025
An AI trained on radiocarbon dating suggests some Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought. The findings could reshape our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity. An AI program trained to study the handwriting styles of ancient manuscripts suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought, as reported in a study published in the journal Plos One on Wednesday . The study is the latest entry in a new era of antiquity studies that has researchers use AI to reveal the secrets written on frayed and crumbling scrolls. The new method combines AI, radiocarbon dating, and handwriting analysis to more accurately estimate an ancient text's age. The now proposed redating could reshape our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and of Judaism and early Christianity, the authors of the study say. "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," said study author Mladen Popovic from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Radiocarbon dating and AI analysis of handwriting The Dead Sea Scrolls, the first of which were discovered in a cave in Israel in 1947, are the most momentous manuscript discovery of the past hundred years. There are around 1,000 manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among them are some of the oldest known copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible. Studies of these manuscripts have profoundly changed understanding of the origins of Christianity and the formation of post-biblical Judaism Dating these manuscripts with paleography — the study of ancient handwriting — reveals them to have been written over several hundred years between 250 B.C.E. and 100 C.E. However, scholars have struggled to analyze ancient texts, particularly with distinguishing one writer's style from another, meaning dating isn't very reliable. The researchers aimed to improve analytical methods by using AI to study handwriting and cross-reference this data with radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating estimates the age of materials by measuring carbon-14 isotopes that slowly disappear over time. "The advantage of the [AI] model is that it provides quantified objectivity to palaeography, reducing the method's subjectivity," the authors write. An AI model was first trained on 24 manuscripts with reliable radiocarbon dating. The authors then used this AI model to analyze the handwriting style of 135 scrolls with unknown dates spanning three centuries from around 200 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. This created a better way of dating written manuscripts with 79% accuracy, according to the analysis. "This novel approach allowed [the researchers] to combine historical expertise with technical precision," said Thea Sommerschield and Yannis Assael, who previously developed AI tools for the study of ancient texts at the University of Oxford, UK, in a joint email to DW. Sommerschield and Assael were not involved in the study. Tomorrow Today — The Science Show To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video New Dead Sea Scroll chronology The authors of the study believe their analysis could lead to a new chronology of the scrolls. If verified, it would change understanding of the history of ancient Judea and the people who wrote the texts. The AI analysis found the manuscripts are older than previous estimates overall, suggesting dates in the early second century B.C.E., and sometimes slightly earlier. Scholars often assume that the rise and expansion of the Hasmonaean kingdom from the mid-second century B.C.E. onward caused a rise in "literacy scribal intellectual culture." The authors say their findings suggest that scribes were copying multiple literary manuscripts before this period. Sommerschield and Assael say the new study shows AI could be used to provide more accurate dating of other ancient texts. "This new study shows that computational tools don't diminish the role of human expertise, they enhance it, opening new paths for discovery in even the most well-studied texts," they said in their email. Antiquity scholars believe they are on the brink of a new era of because of AI. Researchers have also, for example, been using AI to translate ancient texts that have been vexing ancient scholars for decades. Edited by: Matthew Ward Agius
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
New Evidence Rewrites the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls, One of Judaism's Ancient Texts
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: A scholar from the Netherlands used AI to determine that the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously believed. The new AI model pairs handwriting data with radiocarbon dating information to date ancient manuscripts. In the future, scientists hope the model will be useful in dating other mysterious ancient texts Dating ancient artifacts is very difficult. Experts have a number of techniques they can use to get close, but there are limitations that often can't be overcome without additional information. That said, sometimes you get lucky, like the researchers investigating the famous Dead Sea Scrolls did when they realized that the author wrote the dates of creation directly on several of the pages. However, not every scroll was labeled, and as a result, the undated Dead Sea Scrolls have been much harder for scientists to pin down. But when new technologies arise, things can change. According to a new study—in which scientists used AI modeling to study handwriting styles across ancient manuscripts with known dates—some of the undated Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously believed. Mladen Popovic (from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands) and his research team claim that their work not only re-dates some Dead Sea Scrolls, but could open a new way to place undated manuscripts on the timeline of ancient history. The team published their findings in the open-access journal PLOS One. 'It is very exciting to set a significant step in solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscripts from history,' the authors wrote in a statement. 'This would not have been possible without the collaboration between so many different scientific disciplines.' The process started with a bounty of ancient texts used to help build datasets. The team parsed through historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank and used radiocarbon dating to estimate the ages of the documents. The team then trained a machine-learning model to understand the handwriting styles of each document in direct relation to the historic date of the manuscript. The AI model—dubbed Enoch, after the prominent biblical figure—then merged the two datasets. The goal of the work is to be able to 'objectively determine an approximate age range' of a manuscript based solely on the handwriting style on the document. During testing, the scholars said that Enoch's age estimates for the 135 Dead Sea Scrolls were 'realistic' 79 percent of the time, and non-realistic 21 percent of the time (non-realistic here meaning significantly too old, significantly too young, or indecisive). The Enoch model, paired with radiocarbon dating, estimates older ages for 'many of the Dead Sea Scrolls' than traditional handwriting analysis methods. The authors said that more data and further research could help pinpoint the timelines. '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,' the authors wrote in the statement, 'especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
