Many dead sea rolls can be older than it thought, say the experts | Archeology

Many dead sea rolls could be older than we thought before, with biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, according to researchers.

The first of the ancient rolls was discovered in the caves of Qumran in the desert of Judea by Bedouin shepherds in the middle of the 20th century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to certain parts of the Hebrew Bible and are supposed to leave the third century BC in the second century AD.

Now, the researchers have used artificial intelligence to glean new information on the dates of individual rollers – the results suggest that experts could challenge ideas on the moment, where and by whom they were produced.

“It’s like a time machine. So we can shake the hands of these people 2000 years ago, and we can put them in the time much better now, said Professor Mladen Popović, the first author of the Research of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

While some scrolls were radiocarbon dated in the 1990s, Popović said that researchers had not addressed the problem of castor oil contamination – a substance applied in the 1950s to help experts read manuscripts, but which could distort the results.

In addition, many rollers had only been dated in analysis of writing.

Writing in the journal Plos One, the team reports how they tried the radiocarbon dating of 30 samples of different manuscripts found on four sites and thought to extend over five centuries. Above all, the team first cleaned the samples to eliminate contamination of castor oil.

The researchers succeeded in 27 samples dated to the radiocarbon, noting that even if two were younger than the analysis of handwriting had suggested it, many were older.

Among other results, the researchers discovered two different writing styles, called Hasmonean and Herodian scripts, coexisted for a much longer period than we thought previously, while a sample of a manuscript called 4q114 – which contains verses from Daniel’s book – was older than traditional paleography had not suggested.

“It was previously dated from the end of the second century BC, a generation after the author of Daniel’s book. Now, with our study, putting us back in contemporary time towards this author,” said Popović.

The team then used a type of AI known as automatic learning to build a model they called Enoch – a nod to a biblical figure associated with scientific knowledge.

The team formed Enoch, feeding 62 digital images of ink traces of 24 of the manuscripts dated radiocarbon, as well as the carbon 14 dates.

They then checked the model by showing Enoch 13 other images of the same manuscripts. In 85% of cases, the model produced ages that have completed with the radiocarbon dates and produced in many cases a smaller range of probable dates than those obtained from dating with radiocarbon alone.

“What we have created is a very robust tool that is based on empirical – based on physics and geometry,” said Popović.

When Enoch was presented with images of 135 unclear manuscripts that he had not seen before, he realistically dated 79% of them – judging by expert paleographers. Popović added that people deemed unrealistic could have had problematic data, such as poor quality images.

The system has already produced new information, in particular a copy of the ecclesiaste biblical book dates from the time of the alleged perpetrator of the book.

Popović said that Coos meant that the additional roller age could now be discovered without dating in the radiocarbon – a process that requires the destruction of small samples.

“There are more than 1,000 manuscripts of dead sea parchment, so our study is a first but important step, opening a door to history with new research possibilities,” he said.

Professor Emerita Joan Taylor from King’s College in London, said the results would have a major impact on Qumran’s studies.

“These results mean that most of the manuscripts found in the caves near Qumran would not have been written on the Qumran site, which was not busy until later,” she said.

However, Dr. Matthew Collins of the University of Chester warned that the dating in the radiocarbon only highlighted the age of the parchment, and not when it was written, when there were also questions about the way in which stylistically representative, the small number of training samples was for different periods in time.

“Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and which can provide us with a new important tool in our armory to go out with these texts,” he said. “Nevertheless, it is the one we have to adopt with caution and in conjunction with waiting with other evidence.”