Ancient Dead Sea Scrolls may be even more ancient than previously believed by researchers.
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🔍 The AI brainchild nicknamed "Enoch," after the ancient Judaic prophet who didn't kick the bucket, has sparked a discussion in the realm of biblical archaeology. According to a team of international scholars teaming up with this brainiac, some of the famed Dead Sea Scrolls might be a wee bit older than originally thought. Their evidence was published in a study that hit the presses on June 4th in the prestigious journal 📝 PLOS One.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have consistently blown our minds as one of the most 🤯 breathtaking and groundbreaking archaeological discoveries ever made. The first trove of documents was unearthed in the West Bank's Qumran Caves back in 1946, eventually growing to over 15,000 scrolls and parchment fragments within a decade. Historians and religious studies aces have invested years in analyzing this hidden treasure, believed to hail from the Second Temple era (516 BCE-70 CE). The scrolls offer valuable insights into ancient Jewish and early Christian life, and even house some of the oldest complete copies of biblically canonical books that we've got our hands on. Helped solidify the era's rabbinic culture that proudly maintained a nearly standardized written language across a thousand-year timespan.
So, what's the big deal about those missing written dates? Most ancient manuscripts are afraid to show their ages, leaving it up to experts to guess their origin. The ace up the sleeve? Observing changes in ancient handwriting-also known as 🎨 paleography- to get a sense of when a document was penned.
Wanna know the tricky part? Judging a manuscript's age based on its penmanship calls for a decent number of accurately dated manuscripts to serve as references. Gotta account for all the pesky historical complexities, and it can get messy, real fast.
That's where an international team of scholars from Dutch, Danish, Belgian, and Italian universities step in. They created a slick new machine learning program aimed at deciphering and evaluating scanned images of biblical manuscripts. Dubbed 🧠 Enoch (after the Book of Genesis prophet who never croaked), this silver-tongued muse relies on two crucial datasets-a radiocarbon-dated index of historic biblical texts and an analysis of handwriting styles. This magical combination lets Enoch snap a sample text, then spit out a more realistic and accurate age estimate.
Enoch strutted its stuff by analyzing 135 un-dated Dead Sea Scrolls, providing an age estimate for each sample. A gaggle of paleography whizzes compared Enoch's estimations to their own footwork. To their delight, Enoch proved spot-on 79% of the time. The remaining conclusions were either too young, too old, or inconclusive.
What's the kicker? Researchers noted that some of Enoch's accurate estimates hinted that particular Dead Sea Scroll samples were older than scholars initially thought. This vote of confidence was corroborated by further radiocarbon testing. In one intriguing example, Enoch and the scholars agreed that a scroll fragment dated all the way back to the first half of the second century BCE. That's roughly 100 to 150 years older than current theories! What's more, two scroll fragments were dated to the time of their purported authors, pointing toward primary texts.
Although more research is needed to validate Enoch's findings, the team believes this clever cat could provide a new detective-like tool to help experts dive deeper into the origins of ancient texts.
" "It's a thrilling step forward in tackling the age-old problem of Dead Sea Scroll dating and creating a new tool that could bring centuries-old texts to life," the study's authors exclaimed. "We're opening the door to the ancient world via Enoch, letting us peer into the hands that penned the Bible."
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Artificial intelligence, named Enoch, has been developed to assist scholars in dating the Dead Sea Scrolls more accurately, using machine learning and a combination of radiocarbon-dated index and handwriting analysis.
This groundbreaking technology, backed by a team of international scholars, could potentially reveal new insights about the age and origin of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, contributing to a better understanding of medical-conditions, religious practices, and science during the Second Temple era.
