Latest news with #Popović
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Some Dead Sea Scrolls may be even older than archaeologists thought, new study finds
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the most widely known archaeological finds of all time, may be older than once thought, according to a new study. The fresh analysis, which paired radiocarbon dating with artificial intelligence, determined some of the biblical manuscripts date to about 2,300 years ago, when their presumed authors lived, said Mladen Popović, lead author of the report published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Bedouin shepherds first spotted the scrolls by chance in the Judaean Desert, near the Dead Sea, in 1947. Archaeologists then recovered thousands of fragments belonging to hundreds of manuscripts from 11 caves, all near the site of Khirbat Qumran in what is now the West Bank. 'The Dead Sea Scrolls were extremely important when they were discovered, because they completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity,' said Popović, who is also dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. 'Out of around 1,000 manuscripts, a bit more than 200 are what we call biblical Old Testament, and they are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible. They gave us a lot of information about what the text looked like back then.' The scrolls are like a time machine, according to Popović, because they let scholars see what people were reading, writing and thinking at the time. 'They are physical, tangible evidence of a period of history that is crucial — whether you're Christian, Jewish or don't believe at all, because the Bible is one of the most influential books in the history of the world, so the scrolls allow us to study it as a form of cultural evolution,' he said. Almost none of the Dead Sea Scrolls — which were written mostly in Hebrew on parchment and papyrus — have dates on them. Based primarily on paleography, the study and deciphering of ancient writing and manuscripts, scholars have believed the manuscripts range from the third century BC to the second century AD. 'But now, with our project, we have to date some manuscripts already to the end of the fourth century BCE,' he said, meaning that the earliest scrolls could be up to 100 years older than previously thought. 'That's really exciting because it opens up new possibilities to think about how these texts were written and how they moved to other users and readers — outside of their original authors and their social circles,' Popović added. The findings will not only inspire further studies and affect historical reconstructions, according to the authors of the report, but will also unlock new prospects in the analysis of historical manuscripts. Earlier estimates of the manuscripts' age came from radiocarbon dating conducted in the 1990s. Chemist Willard Libby developed this method — used to ascertain the age of organic materials — in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. Also known as carbon 14 dating, a chemical analysis of a sample, such as a fossil or manuscript, determines the quantity of carbon 14 atoms it contains. All living organisms absorb this element, but it starts to decay as soon as death occurs, so looking at how much is left can give a fairly accurate age of an organic specimen as old as about 60,000 years. Carbon dating has downsides, however. The analyzed sample is destroyed during the process, and some results can be misleading. 'The problem with earlier tests (on the scrolls) is that they didn't address the issue of castor oil,' Popović said. 'Castor oil is a modern invention, and it was used in the 1950s by the original scholars to make the text more legible. But it's a modern contaminant, and it skews the radiocarbon result to a much more modern date.' The study team first used new radiocarbon dating, applying more modern techniques, on 30 manuscripts, which revealed that most of them were older than previously thought. Only two were younger. The researchers then used high-resolution images of these newly dated documents to train an AI they developed, called Enoch after the Biblical figure who was the father of Methuselah. The scientists presented Enoch with more documents they had carbon-dated, but withheld the dating information, and the AI correctly guessed the age 85% of the time, according to Popović. 'In a number of cases, the AI even gave a narrower date range for the manuscripts than the carbon 14 did,' he said. Next, Popović and his colleagues fed Enoch more images from 135 different Dead Sea Scrolls that were not carbon-dated and asked the AI to estimate their age. The scientists rated the results as 'realistic' or 'unrealistic,' based on their own paleographic experience, and found that Enoch had given realistic results on 79% of the samples. Some of the manuscripts in the study were found to be 50 to 100 years older than formerly thought, Popović said. One sample from a scroll known to contain verse from the Book of Daniel was once believed to date to the second century BC. 'That was a generation after the original author,' Popović said, 'and now with the carbon 14, we securely move it (further back) to the time of the author.' Another manuscript, with verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, also dates older, Popović added. 'The manuscript was previously dated on paleographic grounds to 175 to 125 BCE, but now Enoch suggests 300 to 240 BCE,' he said. Eventually, artificial intelligence could supplant carbon 14 as a method of dating manuscripts, Popović suggested. 'Carbon 14 is destructive,' he said, 'because you need to cut off a little piece of the Dead Sea Scroll, and then it's gone. It's only 7 milligrams, but it's still stuff that you lose. With Enoch, you don't have to do any of this. This a first step. There are all sorts of possibilities to improve Enoch further.' If the team pushes forward with Enoch's development, Popović believes it could be used to assess scripts such as Syriac, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Scholars who were not involved with the study were encouraged by the findings. Having both AI and an enhanced carbon 14 dating method allows a level of calibration across both methodologies that is helpful, according to Charlotte Hempel, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. 'The pronounced pattern seems to be that AI offers a narrower window within the Carbon 14 window,' she said via email. 'I wonder whether this suggests a higher level of precision, which would be extremely exciting.' The study represents a first attempt to harness AI technology to extend existing scientific knowledge from carbon 14 dating of certain manuscripts to other manuscripts, said Lawrence H. Schiffman, Global Distinguished Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. 'To some extent, it is not yet clear whether or not the new method will provide us with reliable information on texts that have not yet been Carbon-14 dated,' he added via email. 'The interesting comments regarding revision of the dating of some manuscripts that may be expected through further development of this approach or new carbon-14 dating, while not new to this study, constitute a very important observation about the field of Dead Sea Scrolls in general.' Commenting on the computational aspects of the study, Brent Seales, the Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, said the approach taken by the authors seems rigorous even if the sample sizes are small. Using AI to completely replace carbon dating may be premature, however. '(AI) is a useful tool to incorporate into the broader picture, and to make estimates in the absence of Carbon-14 based on the witness of other similar fragments,' Seales wrote in an email. 'Like everything with machine learning, and like a fine wine, it should get better over time and with more samples. The dating of ancient manuscripts is an extremely difficult problem, with sparse data and heavy constraints on access and expertise. Bravo to the team for this data-driven contribution that takes a massive step forward.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought, experts say
Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be older than previously thought, with some biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, researchers say. The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran in the Judean desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-20th century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to parts of the Hebrew Bible, and are thought to date from around the third century BCE to the second century CE. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to glean fresh insights into the dates of individual scrolls – findings experts suggest could challenge ideas about when, where and by whom they were produced. 'It's like a time machine. So we can shake hands with these people from 2,000 years ago, and we can put them in time much better now, said Prof Mladen Popović, first author of the research from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. While some scrolls were radiocarbon dated in the 1990s, Popović said scholars did not tackle the problem of castor oil contamination – a substance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the manuscripts, but which could skew results. In addition, many of the scrolls had only been dated by handwriting analysis. Writing in the journal Plos One, the team report how they attempted radiocarbon dating of 30 samples from different manuscripts found at four sites and thought to span five centuries. Crucially, the team first cleaned the samples to remove the castor oil contamination. The researchers successfully radiocarbon-dated 27 samples, finding that while two were younger than handwriting analysis had suggested, many were older. Among other findings, the researchers discovered two different writing styles, known as Hasmonean and Herodian scripts, coexisted for a much longer period than previously thought, while a sample from a manuscript called 4Q114 – which contains verses from the book of Daniel – was older than traditional palaeography had suggested. 'It was previously dated to the late second century BCE, a generation after the author of the Book of Daniel. Now, with our study we move back in time contemporary to that author,' said Popović. The team then used a type of AI known as machine learning to build a model they called Enoch – a nod to a biblical figure associated with scientific knowledge. The team trained Enoch by feeding it 62 digital images of ink traces from 24 of the radiocarbon dated manuscripts, together with the carbon-14 dates. They then verified the model by showing Enoch a further 13 images from the same manuscripts. In 85% of cases the model produced ages that tallied with the radiocarbon dates, and in many cases produced a smaller range of probable dates than obtained from radiocarbon dating alone. 'What we have created is a very robust tool that is empirically based – based on physics and on geometry,' said Popović. When Enoch was presented with images from 135 undated manuscripts it had not previously seen, it realistically dated 79% of them – as judged by expert palaeographers. Popović added those deemed unrealistic might have had problematic data, such as poor quality images. The system has already produced new insights including that a copy of the biblical book Ecclesiastes dates from the time of the book's presumed author. Popović said Enoch meant the age of further scrolls could now be uncovered without radiocarbon dating – a process that requires the destruction of small samples. 'There are more than 1,000 Dead Sea scrolls manuscripts so our study is a first but significant step, opening a door unto history with new possibilities for research,' he said. Prof emerita Joan Taylor of King's College London, said the results would have a major impact on Qumran studies. 'These results mean that most of the manuscripts found in the caves near Qumran would not have been written at the site of Qumran, which was not occupied until later,' she said. However, Dr Matthew Collins of the University of Chester cautioned that radiocarbon dating only shed light on the age of the parchment, not when it was written on, while there were also questions about how stylistically representative the small number of training samples were for different periods in time. 'Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and one which may provide us with a significant new tool in our armoury for dating these texts,' he said. 'Nevertheless, it's one that we should adopt with caution, and in careful conjunction with other evidence.'
