Al solves a riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls

摘要

ARTIFICIAL intelligence has helped solve a long-standing mystery concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls. The technology confirms that one of the ancient manuscripts -the Great Isaiah Scroll - was penned by two scribes who wrote with very similar handwriting, rather than being the work of a single person. The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient manuscripts unearthed in the 20th century and comprising Biblical and Jewish texts. Among them is the Great Isaiah Scroll (pictured), a copy of the Book of Isaiah that is found in both the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament. The scroll was finished around the 2nd century BC, and written using the Hebrew alphabet, but the number of authors was unknown. So Mladen Popovic at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his team used artificial intelligence to analyse digital images of the manuscript to see whether one person wrote the scroll or if multiple people with similar handwriting worked on it. They looked at variations in the shape and style of the letters that can't be spotted easily by the human eye and found that the scroll was separated into two halves, each written by a different scribe (PLoS One, doi.org/f77c).