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.

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.

Most of the scribes who copied the text contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls were anonymous, as they neglected to sign their work. That has made it challenging for scholars to determine whether a given manuscript should be attributed to a single scribe or more than one, based on unique elements in their writing styles (a study called paleography). Now, a new handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll, applying the tools of artificial intelligence, has revealed that the text was likely written by two scribes, mirroring one another's writing style, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS One. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast.

Artificial intelligence has helped to solve a long-standing mystery concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls. The technology confirms that one of the ancient manuscripts – the Great Isaiah Scroll – was penned by two scribes who wrote with very similar handwriting, rather than being the result of a single person's work. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of ancient Hebrew manuscripts comprising Biblical and Jewish texts, found in caves near the Dead Sea in the mid-20th century. The Great Isaiah scroll is a copy of the Book of Isaiah that is found in both the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. The copy was completed around the 2nd century BC, and is written using the Hebrew alphabet.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were most likely penned by multiple scribes who mirrored one another's writing styles 2,000 years ago, AI-powered analysis has revealed. First found in 1946 in the Qumran Caves of the Judaean Desert, near the Dead Sea, the scrolls comprise some 972 ancient manuscripts in thousands of fragments. The texts were mainly written on animal skins and include parts of the Hebrew Bible as well as an assortment of extra-biblical documents. Little, however, had been known about the scribe or scribes who laboured to produce individual scrolls -- as the works were not signed. And examination by eye of the features of characters written on the scrolls typically leads to subjective and therefore often contentious conclusions.