The Dead Sea Scrolls, found by a shepherd boy in 1947, dating from roughly 200 BC through 100 AD, were remarkably well-preserved. Exciting finds like the Scrolls and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt tempt us to think that when a lost document is found, we will easily physically read it once we understand the language. Sadly, many surviving documents are so damaged that they cannot be read using traditional methods. All we know is that they are/were documents. Nowadays, the 1,700-year-old En-Gedi Scroll--one of the most ancient snippets of the Old Testament ever uncovered--isn't much to look at.

New software tools have enabled scientists to read an ancient, damaged Hebrew scroll without ever unfurling the fragile, disintegrating parchment. The digitization techniques, known as "volume cartography," transformed what were the charred remains of the nearly 2,000-year-old En-Gedi scroll into legible columns of handwritten text from the book of Leviticus, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. "We are reading a real scroll that hasn't been read for millennia," said Brent Seales, who helped develop the cartography techniques and is a computer sciences professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "Many people thought it was impossible to read," he told reporters on a press call on Tuesday. "My technical team and I, we never needed physical access to the scroll."