Older than thought – and some are even copies. AI rewrite the history of Judea and reveals important details.
AI helps accurately decipher various documents. A team of investigators decided to experiment with the unmistakable manuscripts of the Dead Sea – and the result was a discovery that forces us to rethink the history of Judea.
First, the new assessment, based on the AI analysis of handwriting and modern radiocarbon dating techniques, even suggests that some scrolls – such as those that contain the biblical books Daniel and Ecclesiastes – may be copies made during the life of the original authors of the books.
“I am not saying that they were written by the authors themselves,” says researcher Mladen Popović to. “But our study is a significant first step in rethinking what we know about the literacy in the old Judea, which now seems to have emerged before its political independence from the empires who struggled to control it ”.
The published this week in Plos One It also reveals that the researchers began by dating by radiocarbon 27 texts of the Dead Sea manuscripts, which represent a series of different writing styles. Then trained an AI system to associate writing styles with specific dates of 24 of the tested scrolls.
The team then used AI to analyze 135 of the about 1000 manuscripts of the Dead Sea and found that Many were older than previously thought. One of the first writing styles, known as Hasmonaean, may have started around 200 BC – is a difference of a century.
“The first results obtained are absolutely innovative,” says Travis Williams of the University of Tusculum in Tennessee. If the trend is maintained among the other scrolls, he says, he may “Forcing a rethink” the way people considered writing and literacy in a troubled political and social period.
