AI Reveals Answers to Dead Sea Scrolls Author Mysteries

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest and some of the most hotly debated holy texts in history, have been subject to years of discourse between archeological and religious minds when it comes to the subject of their authorship. The 2000 year old manuscripts bear no signatures, and to this day very little is known about who penned the massive works of great significance.

Breakthroughs can happen in unexpected ways, and an AI program analyzing the text was able to spot minute differences at one point in the manuscripts.

The Great Isiah Scroll, one of the originally discovered seven Dead Sea Scrolls found in Palestinian territories in 1947, is the largest and most complete of all the ancient Biblical manuscripts. Until now, it was thought that the mammoth scroll was penned entirely by a single holy scribe. But under closer examination and analysis by an AI program at the University of Groningen, changes in the text imperceptible to the human eye were detected.

While seemingly tiny, this discovery reveals that The Great Isiah Scroll was written by two scribes, not one! Albeit writers of incredibly similar writing style.

This discovery gives historical scientists insight into the scribes who created this piece of history, showing that they must have trained closely together. Maybe they learned their craft from the same source. Possibly even growing up and living together, resulting in a scribal style so nearly identical that only an AI program was able to detect a difference between them.

The incredible AI algorithms responsible for the revelation are the work of PhD candidate Maruf Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker, Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Groningen. The AI is programmed to analyze hundreds of thousands of characters in the manuscript at the same time, allowing it to examine the similarities and differences at a microlevel far beyond human precision

The insight into the still-unidentified creators of these ancient manuscripts is but one more puzzle piece in the amazing real world mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. With new finds and new breakthroughs happening all the time, the insights can earn historians a fascinating look at the earliest knowledge of Judaism. Each new find has so much to teach us.