Scientists Read Ancient Hebrew Scroll Without Opening It
At first glance, you could easily mistake this scorched, 2,000-year-old scroll for a hunk of lump charcoal. It's been burned and crushed, it crumbles at the touch, and it looks absolutely, hopelessly unreadable.
Yet a team of archaeologists and computer scientists led by Brent Seales, a computer imaging expert at the University of Kentucky, has digitally unwrapped it. The En-Gedi manuscript is the first heavily damaged ancient scroll to be virtually unraveled and read, line by line, without opening it.
The scroll, which now resembles a fist-sized glob of ash, was originally discovered in 1970 in Israel near the Dead Sea, in a damaged Holy Ark in an ancient Jewish synagogue. Until now it has been carefully preserved, but never read. Seales and his colleagues just described how the scroll was virtual read in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
"Like many badly damaged materials in archives around the world, the En-Gedi scroll was shelved, leaving its potentially valuable contents hidden and effectively locked away by its own damaged condition," writes Seales and his colleagues.
Virtual Unwrapping
The team started by taking an X-ray scan of the scroll using a device called a micro-computed tomography machine. It's the same machine scientists might otherwise use to create complex 3D images of living tissues, like a slice of lung or a skin parasite.
"This is where we see letters and words for the first time on the recreated page."
This was both the simplest and most dangerous part of the process. Simple because once the relatively straightforward scan was complete, the researchers could work with the scroll's digital image and leave the delicate artifact alone. Dangerous because even gently moving the scroll to and away from the imaging machine risked crumbling and destroying the document. Thankfully, the scroll was safely transported and is once again carefully archived.
With their digital copy complete, the scientists then matched the scroll to a computer model of the scroll's loosely wrapped and squished shape. Because the shape was so strange and irregular, this was an enormous feat, but this allowed to the scientists to estimate what the scroll might look like if its coiled shape were flat like a page. "This is where we see letters and words for the first time on the recreated page," they write in their study.
The scientists also manipulated the flattened version of the scroll with several digital texturing and flattening techniques. The scroll's letters are readable thanks to the unique chemical signature left by metallic compounds in the long-dried ink.
Ancient Text
After having digitally unraveled the burnt, crumbing En-Gedi scroll, the scientists found segments of chapters of the ancient Hebrew text Leviticus-making this the earliest readable copy of Leviticus ever discovered. Interestingly, the readable text is identical to currently used Hebrew versions, which formed the translation for what's currently found in the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles.
Seales and his colleagues plan on making the software programs they used to unwrap the En-Gedi scroll open access. That way, scientists across the world can use the very same techniques on the hundreds of fragile scrolls still stuck, unread in museum archives.
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