Artificial Intelligence and Chemical Analysis to Trace the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran cave in Israel is the strongest evidence for the Jewish religion and its history and many scroll fragments contain ancient copies of the Bible. Where were the scrolls produced and copied, and what can their origins reveal about centers of learning, scribal culture, and the transmission of knowledge in ancient Judea?
What all the parts mean is still largely one giant mystery. There are thousands of fragments but now a new European study will use artificial intelligence to answer old questions about who wrote them and what it all means.
The new project goes beyond handwriting. Researchers will analyze the chemical composition of parchment, papyrus, and ink. While AI won’t be able to tell us, “This scroll was definitely written in Jerusalem in 35 BCE,” it can estimate probabilities based on the evidence.
The plan is to create massive amounts of data that can be available to historians, archaeologists, linguists, and conservators who can interpret the results and decide whether they make historical sense.
The new AI project called Tracing Scribes and Scrolls, brings together researchers from the University of Groningen in Holland, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and leading laboratories and research institutions across Europe.
By combining state-of-the-art chemical analysis, artificial intelligence, paleography, and codicology, the research aims to reconstruct the geographical and cultural contexts in which the scrolls were produced.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are currently under the guardianship of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, and they are one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.
They include the earliest known manuscripts of many books of the Hebrew Bible, together with a remarkable collection of Jewish literary works dating from the late Second Temple period of Jewish life.
Despite decades of research, the precise locations where many of the scrolls were manufactured, prepared, and copied remain unknown.
Were some of the scrolls written at Qumran by a Jewish community living in seclusion there? Were others brought from additional centers of scribal activity in Judea, from Jerusalem, and hidden in the caves in times of danger and peril? Or were the caves also a library, or as a kind of ancient genizah, a place where Jews buried old holy books and literature? These questions stand at the heart of the new project.
Professor Popović, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, will lead a multidisciplinary team of historians, archaeologists, material scientists, chemists, and artificial intelligence specialists over the next five years.
The team will analyze approximately 250 samples from the Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls collection, including parchment, papyrus, and ink. For the first time, papyri from Egypt will be examined alongside papyri from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites, allowing researchers to compare their chemical signatures directly.
These analyses are expected to help identify the material “fingerprints” of the scrolls, reveal the provenance of raw materials, identify production practices, and uncover connections between different centers of scribal activity.
Complementary approaches will enable researchers to develop an unprecedented model for mapping the more than 25,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments preserved by Israel.
The project aims to place individual manuscripts and scribes within their geographical and chronological contexts while identifying centers of writing, learning, literary production, and knowledge transmission in ancient Judea.
According to Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen, Principal Investigator of the project:
The project builds on Professor Popović’s previous ERC-funded project, The Hands That Wrote the Bible, which pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to identify individual scribes responsible for copying the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tracing Scribes and Scrolls expands this work by moving beyond the identification of scribal hands to investigate where scribes worked, the materials they used, and the broader cultural and intellectual networks in which the manuscripts were created and circulated.
“By combining advanced laboratory analysis with the study of ancient handwriting and the remarkable advances in artificial intelligence made in recent years, we are now able to address questions that were previously beyond our reach: who copied these manuscripts, where they were produced, how knowledge circulated, and the role these texts played within the society of their time, said Ilit Cohen-Ofri of the Israel Antiquities Authority in a press release they sent to Green Prophet.
Who is working on the Dead Sea Scrools on the AI project?
There is University of Pisa (Ilaria Degano), the University of Naples Federico II (Leila Birolo), and the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (Kaare Rasmussen and Frank Kjeldsen). At the University of Groningen, Dr. Maruf Dhali will play a central role in developing and implementing the artificial intelligence methods that will integrate the project’s chemical data and identify patterns of provenance and scribal affiliation.
The project also includes collaborations with the Egyptian Museums in Berlin and Turin, as well as KU Leuven, as part of a comparative study of papyri from Egypt and the Judean Desert.
