Scientists say they managed to show for the first time with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Two scribes – not just one person, as previously believed – wrote part of the mysterious ancient Dead Sea manuscripts.
The test was performed on the longest text in ancient Dead Sea manuscripts, known as the Great Isaiah Scroll.
Researchers found that possibly two individuals, whose identity is unknown, copied the words using almost identical handwriting.
The scroll, which contains the oldest known version of the Bible, Has been a source of attraction since its discovery almost 70 years ago.
The first set was found by Bedmin in a cave in Qumran near the Dead Sea, where the West Bank is now under Israeli occupation.
They contain manuscripts, most commonly written in Hebrew, as well as in Aramaic and Greek, and are believed to date from around the 3rd century BCE.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of approximately 950 different texts discovered in the 1940s and 1950s. It differs from all other texts, it is divided into only 54 columns, written in a nearly identical style.
Researchers use heat maps to examine individual papers – Photo: University of Groningen via BBC
Researchers at the University of Groningen HollandExamined the great scrolls of Isaiah using Ezia and state-of-the-art pattern recognition technology. He analyzed the single Hebrew letter, Aleph, which appears on parchment more than 5,000 times.
In an article published by scholars Mladen Popovic, Maroof Dhali and Lambert Shoemaker, they stated that “they were able to remove old paint marks as they appear in digital images”.
“Old paint strokes are directly related to the movement of a person’s muscles and are specific to that person”, He said, using a technique that helps create evidence that parchment contained more than one scribe.
“[O] Probability is the scenario [de que havia] Two different screens trying to work together and maintain the same style of writing, but [cada um] Reveal your personality.
Researchers said that the similarity in handwriting suggests that Shastri can undergo the same training in a school or family.
He said that the ability to “imitate” each other was so good that modern scholars have not yet been able to differentiate between them.
