Artificial intelligence helps identify authors of Dead Sea Scrolls

Among the biggest open questions about the Dead Sea Scrolls are who wrote them, and where. Were these 2,000-year-old manuscripts penned by a single group in the Judean desert, perhaps the enigmatic sect known as the Essenes? Or did they originate in different places and within various Jewish religious streams? The simple answer is that we don't know, since the biblical scribes of antiquity didn't sign their work, cite their allegiance, or give us many clues about their identity. But now Dutch researchers have enlisted artificial intelligence to analyze the handwriting on the scrolls and determine how many different scribes were behind each text.