A new analysis using artificial intelligence technology has revealed that the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls may be much older than previously thought.
The scrolls may be centuries older than originally thought, according to a study that used radiocarbon dating and AI to more accurately analyze the remains of ancient texts, The Times of Israel reports.
“The Dead Sea Scrolls… have completely changed our understanding of ancient Judaism and early Christianity,” said Mladen Popovic, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
“Of the 1,000 manuscripts, just over 200 are what we call the biblical Old Testament,” Popovich told CNN. “These are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible that we have.”
Popovic is Dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Archaeologists have found thousands of remnants of the scrolls, which were first discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert by Bedouin shepherds in what later became the West Bank.
Instead of determining the age of the scrolls by the style of their inscriptions, the researchers used radiocarbon dating to study samples from 30 Dead Sea Scrolls provided by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
They also created high-quality copies of the texts and used an artificial intelligence model called Enoch to analyze the text symbols contained in the 135 scrolls.
The study found that the scrolls are older than previously thought, dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE.
A 1961 paleographic study of the scrolls' text narrowed their origin to this time range, but relatively little has been done to analyze their origins.
In the new study, parchment samples were pre-treated to remove any chemical traces from previous studies before radiocarbon dating, and analysis using artificial intelligence confirmed the results.
This suggests that some of the scrolls could be a century or two older than originally thought, including Old Testament books such as Ecclesiastes.
The study also shows that literacy rates were significantly higher in the region.
“These manuscripts are not just the earliest surviving copies of [Old Testament] books,” Joe Uziel, head of the IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls department, told the Times of Israel.
These are, he says, “some of the oldest copies of these works ever written.”
Only about 10% of the scrolls have been studied, which Popovic says means there are many more discoveries to come from further research into the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Sourse: www.upi.com
