2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls go online

Agencies

Jerusalem, 28 September 2011: 

*Discovered in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have finally entered the digital age, giving all of us a chance to gaze at the most significant archaeological find of the twentieth century

 

Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time in a project launched by Israel’s national museum and Google.

 

The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on the Internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts – who were once criticised for allowing them to be monopolised by small circles of scholars – to make them available to anyone with a computer. 

 

The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Surfers can search high-res images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English. 

 

The originals are kept in a secured vault in a Jerusalem building constructed to house the scrolls. Access requires at least three different keys, a magnetic card and a secret code. The five scrolls are among those purchased by researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers, having first been found by Bedouin shepherds in the Judean Desert. 

 

The scrolls, considered by many to be the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century, are thought to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea. 

The hundreds of manuscripts that survived, partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light on the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity. 

 

The most complete scrolls are held by the Israel Museum, with more pieces and smaller fragments found in other institutions and private collections. Tens of thousands of fragments from 900 Dead Sea manuscripts are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has separately begun its own project to put them online with Google. 

 

Photography work on the project began earlier this month in conjunction with a former NASA scientist. An advanced $2,50,000 camera developed in Santa Barbara, California allows researchers to discern words and other details not visible to the naked eye. 

 

The Antiquities Authority project is tentatively set to be complete by 2016, at which point nearly all of the scrolls will be available on the Internet. 

 

Read the available scrolls online at http://bit.ly/puYd3o

 

 Dead Sea scroll facts: 

• The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea between the years 1947 and 1956. The area is 13 miles east of Jerusalem and is 1300 feet below sea level. Only Caves 1 and 11 have produced relatively intact manuscripts. Discovered in 1952, Cave 4 produced the largest find. About 15,000 fragments from more than 500 manuscripts were found.

 

• In all, scholars have identified the remains of about 825 to 870 separate scrolls

 

• The Scrolls can be divided into two categories-biblical and non-biblical

 

• The Temple Scroll is the longest scroll. Its present total length is 26.7 feet. The overall length of the scroll must have been over 28 feet

 

• The scrolls are most commonly made of animal skins, but also papyrus and one of copper. They are written with a carbon-based ink, from right to left, using no punctuation except for an occasional paragraph indentation. In fact, in some cases, there are not even spaces between the words