The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, has opened "Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition," featuring a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts along with 200 other artifacts. The Dead Sea Scrolls may be even older than researchers thought, according to a new study driven by an artificial intelligence (AI) model. A group of researchers from the Netherlands, Italy and Denmark recently published their findings in the journal PLOS One on June 4. The researchers said they developed an AI-based date-prediction model named Enoch, a nod to the biblical patriarch of the same name. Enoch "was trained as a machine learning-based date-prediction model applying Bayesian ridge regression on established handwriting-style descriptors," according to the study.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are surely among the most historically and biblically important objects known to humankind. Found in caves near the Dead Sea nearly 100 years ago, these ancient manuscripts have transformed understanding of Jewish and Christian origins. Penned upon the 1,000 scrolls were profound religious texts, hymns, prayers, legal codes, commentaries and more. Until now, the scrolls have been assumed to date somewhere between the third century BC and the first century AD. But according to a new AI analysis, some of the scrolls date back as far as the fourth century BC – nearly 2,500 years ago.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A specially designed artificial intelligence program named after a Judaic prophet suggests one of biblical archeology's greatest finds require reexamination. According to an international team of researchers in consultation with "Enoch," some of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be a bit older than we thought. Their evidence is laid out in a study published on June 4 in the journal PLOS One. The Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most remarkable and revolutionary archeological discoveries ever made.

Determining the chronology of ancient handwritten manuscripts is essential for reconstructing the evolution of ideas. For the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is particularly important. However, there is an almost complete lack of date-bearing manuscripts evenly distributed across the timeline and written in similar scripts available for palaeographic comparison. Here, we present Enoch, a state-of-the-art AI-based date-prediction model, trained on the basis of new radiocarbon-dated samples of the scrolls. Enoch uses established handwriting-style descriptors and applies Bayesian ridge regression. The challenge of this study is that the number of radiocarbon-dated manuscripts is small, while current machine learning requires an abundance of training data. We show that by using combined angular and allographic writing style feature vectors and applying Bayesian ridge regression, Enoch could predict the radiocarbon-based dates from style, supported by leave-one-out validation, with varied MAEs of 27.9 to 30.7 years relative to the radiocarbon dating. Enoch was then used to estimate the dates of 135 unseen manuscripts, revealing that 79 per cent of the samples were considered 'realistic' upon palaeographic post-hoc evaluation. We present a new chronology of the scrolls. The radiocarbon ranges and Enoch's style-based predictions are often older than the traditionally assumed palaeographic estimates. In the range of 300-50 BCE, Enoch's date prediction provides an improved granularity. The study is in line with current developments in multimodal machine-learning techniques, and the methods can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections. This research shows how Enoch's quantitative, probability-based approach can be a tool for palaeographers and historians, re-dating ancient Jewish key texts and contributing to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins.

Though archaeologists still aren't sure who authored the Dead Scrolls, they may now be one step closer to understanding the origins of the artifacts thanks to a new study that made use of artificial intelligence. According to the study, which was published by the journal PLOS ONE this week, it's likely that not one but two people wrote the text on the ancient Jewish manuscripts, which date back to between the 3rd century B.C.E. "In a way that was not possible before, our approach opens access to the tangible evidence of the hitherto almost completely inaccessible microlevel of the individual scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the possibility to examine the different compositions copied by each of the scribes," researchers Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker wrote. For their study, the researches utilized artificial intelligence technology to examine the writing on the scrolls, comparing the look of certain letters and analyzing patterns that appear in the ink. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been a continual source of fascination, both within archaeological circles and beyond, and the new study is not the only piece of news surrounding them to emerge in recent months.

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.

Technology has enabled new insight into ancient documents that have fascinated and often mystified scholars of Jewish and religious history since their discovery around 70 years ago. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used artificial intelligence to analyze the longest text of the Dead Sea Scrolls, running at 24 feet long and consuming 17 pieces of parchment. The Great Isaiah Scroll, according to the newly published research, was written by two scribes with very similar handwriting, not one author as previously thought. The Groningen study notes that those previous explanations of authorship were based on educated guesses. "We will never know their names," Mladen Popovic, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the scrolls. They presented their results in the journal PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021. The scribes who created the scrolls did not sign their work.

Though archaeologists still aren't sure who authored the Dead Scrolls, they may now be one step closer to understanding the origins of the artifacts thanks to a new study that made use of artificial intelligence. According to the study, which was published by the journal PLOS ONE this week, it's likely that not one but two people wrote the text on the ancient Jewish manuscripts, which date back to between the 3rd century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. "In a way that was not possible before, our approach opens access to the tangible evidence of the hitherto almost completely inaccessible microlevel of the individual scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the possibility to examine the different compositions copied by each of the scribes," researchers Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker wrote. For their study, the researches utilized artificial intelligence technology to examine the writing on the scrolls, comparing the look of certain letters and analyzing patterns that appear in the ink. The study did not offer details on the identities of the two possible authors of these texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been a continual source of fascination, both within archaeological circles and beyond, and the new study is not the only piece of news surrounding them to emerge in recent months.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used artificial intelligence to analyze the longest text of the Dead Sea Scrolls, running …