Source: Julie Borg
The contents of a 1,500-year-old-parchment scroll, burned so badly it
could not be opened without destroying it, has remained a mystery since
its excavation, 45 years ago, from inside the Holy Ark of the synagogue
at Ein Gedi, Israel, on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
But scientists at the University of Kentucky recently used a new
software program to digitally unwrap parts of the document and analyze
its text. They were surprised to find the first eight verses of the book
of Leviticus enshrouded within the scroll.
“The discovery was providential,” said Brent Seales, the University of
Kentucky computer science professor who designed the software. “We
didn’t know what we would find or where in the scroll the text would
start.”
The most ancient manuscript of Leviticus that archeologists have
discovered so far dates to the first century B.C. and is part of the
Dead Sea scrolls. Researchers have found no other copies of the book
dated to within a thousand years of that.
“It is important to go as far back as possible to the original sources
and to have continuous examples of copies of texts without
one-thousand-year gaps where we can lose track of things,” Seales said.
The scientists captured the text in the scroll through a two-step process.
First, a 3-D scan produced digital images of cross-sectional slices of
the scroll, much like an MRI takes cross-sectional pictures of a brain.
Next, the new software program transformed the cross-sectional slices
into the writing on the individual surfaces.
The process is similar to what would happen if a doctor took an MRI
scan of a tattoo on someone’s arm, Seales said. The scan would produce
digital images of cross-sectional slices of the skin’s surface.
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“Each cross-sectional slice would show only a smidgen of the tattoo.
You would see the tattoo from the side of the slice instead of from the
top,” he said.
The unwrapping software takes those “smidgens” of tattoo on the
cross-sectional pieces, puts them together, and aligns them to produce
an image of the whole tattoo. Geometry is important.
“If the smidgens aren’t lined up just right the image will be jumbled,” Seales said.
Seales hopes this technique will aid biblical scholarship by providing
texts as far back as possible to the original sources and will increase
our understanding of the time when Christ walked on the earth.
“It will be intriguing to pull out more from what we have already
discovered, or from what we may yet discover, from that time period,” he
said.
The researchers still have much work to do. They have analyzed only one
of the six or seven layers available within the scroll and the Holy Ark
at En Gedi is brimming with more remnants. Their technology also can be
used to analyze other types of manuscripts, such as writings preserved
from a famous author, that are too damaged to be unfolded.
Courtesy: WORLD News Service
Publication date: August 10, 2015
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