Many of the Morte Manuscriptso, some of the most well -known archaeological findings of all timecan be older What was thought, according to a new study.
The new, which combined radiocarbon dating with artificial intelligence, determined that some of the biblical manuscripts date from about 2,300, when they would have lived their alleged authors, said Mladen Popović, the main author of the study published on Wednesday in the magazine.
Bedouin shepherds found their scrolls by chance in the Judea Desert near the Dead Sea in 1947. Archaeologists then recovered thousands of fragments belonging to hundreds of manuscripts in 11 caves, all near the Khirbat Qumran site in present -day Worm.
“The manuscripts of the Dead Sea were extremely important when they were discovered, because they completely changed the way we understand ancient Judaism and primitive Christianity,” said Popović, who is also director of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
“Of the approximately 1,000 manuscripts, just over 200 are what we call the biblical Old Testament, and they are the oldest copies we have from the Hebrew Bible. They gave us a lot of information about what the text was like at that time.”
For Popović, the scrolls work like a time machine as they allow scholars to see what people were reading, writing and thinking at that time. “They are physical and tangible evidence of a crucial historical period-whether you are Christian, Jewish, or believe nothing, because the Bible is one of the most influential books in world history, so manuscripts allow us to study it as a form of cultural evolution,” he explained.
Almost none of the Dead Sea manuscripts – which were written mainly in Hebrew, parchment and papyrus – has a date recorded. Based mainly on paleography (the study and deciphering of ancient writing and manuscripts), scholars believed that the manuscripts dated between the 3rd century BC and the second century DC
“But now, with our project, we have to date some manuscripts for the end of the fourth century AC,” he said, which means that the oldest documents can be up to 100 years older than they were thought.
“This is really exciting because it opens new possibilities to think about how these texts were written and how they circulated among other readers and users – as well as their original authors and social circles,” added Popović.
According to the study’s authors, discoveries should not only inspire new studies and impact historical reconstructions, but also open new perspectives on the analysis of historical manuscripts.
Determining the age of the Dead Sea manuscripts
Previous estimates of manuscripts came from radiocarbon dating from the 1990s. Willard Libby chemist developed this method – used to determine the age of organic materials – in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago.
Also known as carbon-14 dating, this type of analysis measures the amount of carbon-14 atoms present in a sample (such as a fossil or manuscript). All living organisms absorb this element, but it begins to decay after death, so by analyzing how much it remains, it is possible to estimate the age of the sample with reasonable precision, up to about 60,000 years.
But the method has disadvantages. The sample analyzed is destroyed in the process and some results may be misleading. “The problem with previous tests (in the manuscripts) is that they did not consider the issue of castor oil,” said Popović.
“Castor oil is a modern invention and was used in the 1950s by the original scholars to make the text more readable. But it is a modern contaminant, and this distorts the result of dating, making it seem that the manuscript is newer than it really is.”
The study team applied modern radiocarbon techniques to 30 manuscripts, revealing that most of them were older than thought. Only two were more recent.
Then the researchers used high resolution images of these newly lived documents to train an artificial intelligence developed by them, called Enoch, in reference to the biblical figure Father of Methuselah. Scientists then presented to Enoch other documents already dated by carbon, but hid the dates.
AI agreed to age in 85% of cases, according to Popović. “In many cases, the tool has offered a narrower dates than carbon-14 dating,” he said.
Then Popović and his colleagues provided in Ease images of 135 other dead sea manuscripts who had not been studied with this technique and asked AI to estimate age. Scientists have classified results as “realistic” or “non -realistic” based on their own paleographic experience and found that Enoch gave realistic results in 79% of samples.
Some manuscripts in the study were considered 50 to 100 years older than previously thought, Popović said.
A scroll known for containing verses from the book of Daniel, for example, was dated from the second century BC ac “this was a generation after the original author,” Popović explained, “and now, with carbon-14 dating, we managed to safely put it in the author’s time.”
Another manuscript, with verses of the book of Ecclesiastes, is also older than thought. “He had been paleographically dated between 175 and 125 BC, but now Enoch suggests between 300 and 240 BC,” said Popović.
Eventually, artificial intelligence can replace carbon-14 as a method of manuscript dating, Popović suggested. “Carbon-14 is destructive,” he explained. “You need to cut a little bit of the dead sea manuscript, and then it gets lost. It’s just 7 milligrams, but it’s still a lost material. With Enoch, you don’t have to do any of this. This is just the first step. There are many possibilities to further enhance Enoch.”
If the team advances in the development of Enoch, Popović believes it can be used to analyze writings in Syriac, Arab, Greek and Latin.
“A gigantic advance”
Scholars who did not participate in the study were excited about the findings. Having carbon dating-14 enhanced method available at the disposal between the two methodologies, which is useful, according to Charlotte Hempel, professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism of the second temple at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom.
“The pattern observed is that AI offers a narrower dating window inside the carbon-14 window,” he said by email. “I wonder if this suggests a higher level of precision, which would be extremely exciting.”
The study represents the first attempt to use technology to expand the existing scientific knowledge of dating from the traditional method of certain manuscripts to others, said Lawrence H. Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at New York University.
“To some extent, it is still unclear whether the new method will provide reliable information about texts that have not yet been dated by carbon-14,” he added by email.
“Interesting comments on the revision of dating from some manuscripts, which can be expected with the additional development of this approach or with new carbon-14 dating, although not new in this study, constitute a very important observation about the field of dead sea manuscripts in general.”
Commenting on the computational aspects of the study, Brent Seales, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, said that the authors’ approach seems rigorous, even if sample sizes are still small.
Using IA to completely replace carbon dating can be premature, however. “(Artificial Intelligence) is a useful tool to be incorporated into the general staff, and to make estimates in the absence of carbon-14 based on the testimony of other similar fragments,” Seales wrote by email.
“Like everything with machine learning – and how good wine – it should improve over time and more samples. Old manuscripts dating is an extremely difficult problem, with scarce data and strong access and specialization restrictions. Bravo to the team for this contribution based on data that represents a huge breakthrough.”
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