Amazing Technology

On Thursday The Times of Israel posted an article about the use of artificial intelligence in archeology.

The article reports:

New research has revealed tantalizing evidence in the mystery of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, identifying that two scribes were apparently behind one of the most famous of the manuscripts, and not just a single workman as had been largely assumed.

Harnessing the keen attention to detail of computer-assisted pattern recognition boosted by artificial intelligence, biblical and computer researchers from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands analyzed the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the first of a trove of ancient scrolls discovered in the caves in the Qumran region near the Dead Sea in 1947.

That there were two scribes “sheds new light on the production of biblical manuscripts in ancient Judea,” the authors of the study wrote.

The results of the study by Mladen Popovic, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism, Lambert Schomaker, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence Maruf Dhali, all from Groningen, was published Wednesday in the PLOS ONE archaeological journal.

“Demonstrating that two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible’s ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes, while carefully mirroring another scribe’s writing style, could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript,” they said.

The article concludes:

The researchers used digital images of the scrolls and were able to identify distinctive ink traces, unique to each scribe.

“This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person’s muscle movement and are person-specific,” they wrote.

By identifying individual scribes from the differences in their penmanship, archaeologists may be able to piece together the links between fragments of other scrolls and gain a better insight into their origins. The same process could also be applied to other ancient manuscripts in the future.

“The change of scribal hands in a literary manuscript or the identification of one and the same scribe in multiple manuscripts can be used as evidence to understand various forms of scribal collaboration that otherwise remain unknown to us,” the study said.

Wow.