June 7 (UPI) – Ancient defilements of the Dead Sea are probably much older than what did not think about it, suggests a new analysis of artificial intelligence.
The scrolls could have centuries more than what thought it initially. Israel’s times reported.
“Dead Sea Pads … have completely changed our way of thinking of ancient Judaism and early Christianity,” said Mladen Popovic, principal author of the study that was published on Wednesday in the journal Plos a.
“On 1,000 manuscripts, just over 200 are what we call Biblical Old Testament”, Popovic said to cnn. “These are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible.”
Popovic is the dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Archaeologists have recovered thousands of rollers discovered for the first time in 1947 in the Judeanes desert by Bedouin shepherds in an area which has become the West Bank.
Instead of going out with the scrolls according to the shape of their lettering, the researchers used the carbon dating to analyze the samples of 30 of the dead sea rolls which were provided by the authority of Israeli antiques.
They also created high resolution copies of the scripts and used a model fueled by AI called “Enoch” to analyze the textual characters contained in 135 rollers.
The study revealed that the rolls are older than we thought initially, which is from the 3rd century BC in the 1st century AD JC
A paleographic study of the text in the parchments has narrowed their origin at this period in 1961, but it has not been made to analyze their origin until now.
The new study pretented pieces of parchment to eliminate the chemical traces of previous studies before undertaking a carbon dating, and the analysis of AI corroborates the results.
He suggests that some of the scrolls had one or two centuries more than they thought, including the books of the Old Testament as the ecclesiasts.
The study also suggests that literacy was much more widespread in the region.
“These manuscripts are not only the first copy of these books (of the Old Testament) which have survived,” said the head of the IAA sea unit, Joe Uziel, to the Times of Israel.
They are “one of the oldest copies of these ever written compositions,” he said.
Only around 10% of scrolls have been studied, which, according to Popovic, means that there is much more to learn through more studies on the dead sea rolls.
