William Atkins
Sunday, 31 August 2008 20:23
Science -
Biology
Page 1 of 2
Israeli scientists are preparing to digitally photograph thousands of fragments of the approximate one thousand separate documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls so they will be viewable on the Internet to the general public and available for scientific and religious study.
On August 27, 2008, the Israeli internet news agency
YNET announced that the project to digitize the Scrolls had begun by the Israeli Antiquities Authority (
IAA) under the advisement of experts at the King’s College London and with sophisticated imaging equipment provided by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The
Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of the Hebrew Bible, are believed to have been compiled about two thousand years ago. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, they contain all of the books of the Old Testament, along with other religious materials written before and after the time of Jesus. The Scrolls are written on parchment or papyrus.
High-technology digital cameras will use infrared imagery to photograph all of the
Dead Sea Scroll. Many of the Scrolls will also be imaged with a special multi-spectral imaging camera.
The sophisticated technique will allow many sections of the 2,000-year-old scrolls to be identified after over sixty years of being unable to be deciphered by earlier, less-sophisticated technologies.
In 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd by the name of Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (nicknamed edh-Dhib, translated as "the wolf") is generally accepted to have been the first person to discover them when he found some of them buried in a Wadi Qumran cave near the ruins of an ancient settlement of Khirbet Oumran in the West Bank.
Over the next 32 years, the current collection of Scrolls was uncovered in eleven caves about one mile (1.6 kilometer) inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.
Additional information on the preservation project continues on page two.
