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Scientists Virtually Unroll, Read Ancient Biblical Scroll

From damage to discovery via virtual unwrapping: Reading the scroll from En-Gedi.

A badly charred ancient Hebrew scroll that hasn’t been read in more than 1,500 years has been brought back to life thanks to modern technology, according to a newly published paper in the journal Science Advances. Using a computer program, scientists for the first time have digitally unrolled and read the brittle En-Gedi scroll without even touching it, and what they found written inside was extraordinary.

From damage to discovery via virtual unwrapping: Reading the scroll from En-Gedi.

In 1970, Israeli archaeologists excavating an ancient synagogue near the village of En-Gedi on the western shore of the Dead Sea discovered the oldest Hebrew scroll outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Written on parchment made of animal skin, the manuscript had resided in an ark when a fire consumed the village around 600 A.D. By the time archaeologists found it more than a millennium later, the badly burnt En-Gedi scroll looked like just a lump of charcoal.

Curious scholars wondered what was written on the extremely fragile manuscript, but the traditional approach of unrolling a scroll and pressing it flat in order to duplicate text was not an option for the carbonized relic. In fact, no technology existed in 1970 to examine the scroll’s contents without destroying the artifact itself. So the En-Gedi scroll, which carbon-14 measurements dated to the third and fourth century A.D., sat untouched with its contents remaining a secret.

Decades later, however, advances in technology finally gave scientists a chance to peek inside the severely charred scroll. Israeli researchers heard about a new computer imaging program, called Volume Cartography, developed by University of Kentucky computer scientist W. Brent Seales that could “virtually unwrap” an ancient scroll and allow researchers to read the text inside.

Although skeptical it would come to any fruition, Pnina Shor, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority, asked for the En-Gedi scroll to be scanned by a micro-computed tomography machine normally used for cancer analysis. The high-resolution scan of the En-Gedi scroll was then sent from Israel to Kentucky for examination. Without ever seeing the physical artifact, Seales and his research team processed the scans to produce flattened-out pictures of the layers inside the ancient scroll, converting a 3-D object into an unfurled 2-D sheet.

After the processing, whole verses of text on five complete wraps of the scroll became apparent, and the quality of the metallic ink was good enough to allow serious textual criticism. “The discovery of the text in the En-Gedi scroll absolutely astonished us,” Shor said at a teleconference announcing the findings. “It was certainly a shot in the dark.”

“We were amazed at the quality of the images since much of the text is as readable, or as close to as readable, as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls,” added Michael Segal, a biblical studies professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who helped to analyze the text.