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Most of them The scribes who copied the text contained in the Sea Month Quotes were anonymous because they had stopped signing their work. This has made it difficult for scholars to determine whether a manuscript should be attributed to one or more scribes, based on specific elements of their writing styles (research called paleography). Now, a new study of the writing of Isaiah the Great Scroll, applying the tools Artificial intelligence, revealed that the text was probably written by two scribes, reflecting each other’s writing style, according to new paper published in the journal PLOS One.
As we have reported before, these ancient Hebrew texts – approximately 900 full and partial parchments in all, kept in clay vessels — first found scattered in various caves near the first Qumran settlement, north of the Dead Sea — by Bedouin shepherds in 1946-1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock at him while looking for a lost member of his flock and inadvertently smashed a clay vessel to the find.) The Romans destroyed it in Qumran, c. Around 73, and historians believe the parchments were hidden. in the caves they were not destroyed by a sect called Essenes. Natural limestone and the condition of the interior of the caves helped to preserve the parchments for thousands of years; K. a. III. century and K. a. They date from the 1st century.
Several parchments have been dated to carbon, and synchrotron radiation — among other techniques — has been used to elucidate the properties of the ink used for the texture. Recently, in 2018, an Israeli scientist named Oren Ableman used a computer-associated infrared microscope identify and decipher Portions of the Sea Month scroll have been stored in a cigarette box since the 1950s.
A 2019 study The so-called Temple Scroll he concluded parchment has an unusual coating coated with sulfate salt (including sulfur, sodium, gypsum and calcium), which may be one of the reasons the scrolls are so well preserved. And last year, the researchers found The four fragments preserved at the University of Manchester, which have long been thought to be empty, contained a hidden text, probably an excerpt from the Book of Ezekiel.
The current article is based on the Great Scroll of Isaiah, one of the original parchments found in Qumran Cave 1 (designated 1QIsa). It is the only scroll in the caves that has been completely preserved, apart from a few small damaged areas where the skin has cracked. The Hebrew text is written on 17 pages of parchment, measuring 24 feet long and 10 inches high, which contains the full text of the Book of Isaiah. This makes the oldest copy of the book of Isaiah Scroll about 1,000 years old. (Israel Museum, in collaboration with Google) digitized by Isaiah Scroll Along with the English translation as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project.)
Most scholars believed that Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single writer because of the uniform appearance of the writing. But others have suggested that it may be the work of two scribes who write in a similar style, each copying one of two different parts of the parchment. “They would try to find a ‘smoking gun’ for handwriting, for example, a very specific feature in a letter that would identify a scribe.” said author Mladen Popovic University of Groningen. Popović is also the director of the university’s Qumran Institute, which studies the books of the Dead Sea.
In other words, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and is based on the experience of a particular scholar. The challenge is in part because a scribe can have considerable variability in his writing style, so how do you determine what a natural variation is or a subtle difference that represents a different hand? To complicate matters, similar writing could be a sign that the two scribes shared common training, a sign that the scribe was tired or injured, or a change in the scribe’s writing tools.
“The human eye is amazing and supposedly takes these levels into account as well. It allows experts to ‘see’ the hands of different authors, but that decision is often not made through a transparent process.” said Popovic. “Furthermore, it is almost impossible for these experts to process the large amounts of data provided by parchments.” Isaiah Scroll, for example, contains at least 5,000 occurrences of the letter aleph (“a”), so it is almost impossible to compare each aleph by eye. Popović believes that model knowledge and artificial intelligence techniques would be appropriate for this task.
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