Who wrote it? How many people left Many secrets surround these ancient papyri. Technology helps reveal its secrets. Thanks to her, the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls were analyzed. It was known that they were made by at least two scribes. It has been verified thanks to an analysis using artificial intelligence (AI).
The Isaiah Scroll
The tests were conducted on the longest text known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. The analysis was carried out by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Two people had copied the words with almost identical handwriting.
The first sets of scrolls were found by a Bedouin in a cave in Qumran. This is near the Dead Sea in what is now the West Bank. These are manuscripts, mainly in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, from the 3rd century BC. C.
The Isaiah Scroll is one of 950 texts discovered in the 1940s and 1950s. Its 54 columns are divided in half and written in an almost uniform style. In order to analyze the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this scroll was taken. They used “innovative” pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. They analyzed a single Hebrew letter, Aleph, that appears on the scroll more than 5,000 times.
Distinguish letters
The article was published by the scientists Mladen Popovic, Maruf Dhali and Lambert Schomaker. “We were able to extract traces of old ink as they appear in digital images.”
“The old ink strokes are directly related to a person’s muscle movement. They are specific to the person, ”they explained. His technique helped provide evidence that more than one scribe was involved.
“The most likely scenario is that two different scribes are working closely together. They tried to keep the same writing style. But they show up with their individualities, “they added.
What is the result of the written similarity? Maybe they got the same education in a school or a family. Like “a father who taught his son to write”.
They said that the scribes’ ability to “imitate” others is very good. So far, modern scientists have not been able to distinguish between them.
