Google Illuminates the Dead Sea Scrolls

Hey babies,

Want your very own copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls? You’ll soon be able to access the ancient writings in their – sort of – original form thanks to this interesting new project brought to you by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google.

Joel Greenberg of The Washington Post explains:

The joint project is the latest stage of gradually widening access to the 2,000-year-old documents, once available to only a restricted group of scholars but made more accessible in recent decades through facsimile editions and published studies. Organizers say the first images will be online in a few months.

The project marries “one of the most important finds of the previous century with the most advanced technology of the next century,” said Pnina Shor, the director of the project at the Antiquities Authority. “We are putting together the past with the future in order to share it.”

The scrolls were discovered in the late 1940s and the 1950s in caves east of Jerusalem, near the ruins of Qumran on the Dead Sea. Scholars say the manuscripts, written between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D., provide important insights into the history of Judaism and early Christianity. They include the earliest known copies of books of the Hebrew Bible.

Shor said the approximately 30,000 scroll fragments, making up 900 documents, would be digitally photographed using infrared and multi-spectral imaging, producing high-resolution, enlargeable images of the original scrolls whose clarity would make it possible to better decipher them.

The multi-spectral photography, based on techniques developed at NASA, was intended to detect physical changes in the scrolls – which are mostly made of parchment, though some are papyrus – and to track their deterioration for preservation purposes, Shor said. But it has also revealed or improved the legibility of parts of the text that have faded and discolored with age and are not visible to the naked eye.

Read more here and check out this super-spooky and intriguing episode of the vintage TV show In Search Of. In this episode Leonard Nimoy illuminates the mysteries of the scrolls while relating the fascinating tale of their discovery. It’s like something out of Indiana Jones. Enjoy:

Joe Nolan <3