A groundbreaking study combining traditional scholarship and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shaken the archaeological world by suggesting that the Hebrew Bible (Dead Sea Scrolls) may have been compiled dozens to hundreds of years earlier than previously assumed.
The research has just been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
Until now, determining the age of ancient scrolls has been mainly based on analysis of the shape of the writing (paleography).
However, the interdisciplinary research team began by using radiocarbon (C-14) dating on 30 leather manuscripts held by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
After determining the age of the specimens, the team digitized high-resolution images of the Hebrew and Aramaic characters and fed them into an AI model called “Enoch” — a geometry-based character shape analysis system.
Based on data from dated manuscripts, Enoch was able to learn the chronological characteristics of the writing and deduce the dates of 135 other manuscripts without performing destructive tests. The results showed that when compared with expert assessments, Enoch was up to 79% accurate.
“We solved the big problem of the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Professor Mladen Popović, Director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and co-author of the study. “The combination of archaeology, physics, AI, history and philology is revolutionary.”
The Enoch model – now open source – opens the door to re-dating hundreds of manuscripts found in the Judean desert over the past several decades. The initial findings also reveal that two biblical manuscripts may have been written just a few years after their contents were written, something that had never been confirmed before.
The research is part of a decades-long project called “The Hands That Wrote the Bible,” funded by the European Research Council.
According to Professor Eibert Tigchelaar, an expert on the "Dead Sea Scrolls" from the University of Leuven (Belgium), the difference of several decades in dating is extremely important, because it can put the texts in completely different political and cultural contexts.
Determining the age using C-14 also faces many challenges, as each manuscript was preserved in different conditions for more than 2,000 years.
The key, according to Professor Elisabetta Boaretto from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, is the step of treating the sample to completely remove impurities - something that has never been done so thoroughly before. She stressed that this is a commendable step in combining modern technology to shed light on ancient questions.
Many of the manuscripts, which have been re-dated, are older than the Qumran community, home to the people believed to have written most of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This raises questions about the formation of cultural phenomena that have traditionally been linked to specific historical events.
Researcher Joe Uziel of IAA hopes this research will pave the way for wider application of AI in the field of archaeology./.
Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/su-dung-ai-de-xac-dinh-nien-dai-cuon-kinh-thanh-bang-tieng-do-thai-post1042990.vnp
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