AI & Archaeology · Late Second Temple period · Qumran, Judean Desert, Levant
€2.5 million project will use AI to find where the Dead Sea Scrolls were made
A Groningen-led international team will test about 250 scroll samples chemically and use AI and handwriting study to trace where the scrolls were made.
Official announcement
Qumran, Judean Desert, Levant A new five-year project will use artificial intelligence and chemical tests to work out where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written and copied. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for the work. The project is just starting, and no results have been announced.
The project is called Tracing Scribes and Scrolls. Mladen Popović leads it. He is professor of the Old Testament and Ancient Judaism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
An open question about where the scrolls were made
The scrolls include the oldest known copies of many books of the Hebrew Bible. They also include a large group of Jewish texts from the late Second Temple period. The Israel Antiquities Authority preserves them in Jerusalem. After decades of study, scholars still do not know where many of the scrolls were made.
Scholars hold several views. Some think a Jewish community at Qumran copied many of the scrolls. Others suggest the scrolls came from different writing centres, including Jerusalem, and were hidden in nearby caves in times of danger. Another idea is that the caves were a library or a store for worn religious texts.
Chemical fingerprints sorted by AI
The team plans to examine about 250 samples of parchment, papyrus and ink from the collection. They will compare the chemical make-up of papyri from Egypt with material from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites. The team expects this to reveal distinct material fingerprints. These could show where raw materials came from and how different scrolls were produced.
Maruf Dhali of the University of Groningen develops the AI approach. It will cluster the chemical data and search for patterns that point to where the material came from. Dhali and Popović will then study these clusters for features of handwriting, scroll construction, language and literary content.
The physical details include how sheets were prepared, page layout, margins and stitching. The researchers will combine all of this to build a fuller picture of how the manuscripts were made.
From identifying scribes to locating them
The new work builds on an earlier ERC project led by Popović, The Hands That Wrote the Bible. That project used AI to identify individual scribes behind the scrolls. The new one aims to find where those scribes worked, which materials they used and how texts circulated.
The researchers aim to build the first large-scale model for mapping more than 25,000 scroll fragments. They hope to place individual manuscripts and scribes in time and place. This could identify centres of writing and learning in ancient Judea and nearby regions.
Popović said recent advances in AI now let researchers investigate questions that were hard to answer before. In his account, this works when AI is combined with laboratory tests and handwriting analysis. The questions include where manuscripts were copied and how knowledge spread through ancient Jewish society.
The team includes researchers from the universities of Pisa, Naples Federico II, Southern Denmark and Groningen, and from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Museums in Berlin and Turin, along with KU Leuven, will help compare papyri from Egypt with papyri from the Judean Desert.
Sources
- Where the Dead Sea Scrolls come from: AI and chemical analysis trace origins (Archaeology News)
- Mladen Popović awarded €2.5 million ERC grant to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls (University of Groningen)
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