(which too often isn’t what it’s used for)Since I first discovered Pauline Evans’ blog, Perennial Student, I’ve come to appreciate her work for a number of things—not least that she has a sharp eye for all sorts of interesting stories that I would otherwise miss. A few days ago, for instance, she pointed me to a real piece of good news in the world of biblical scholarship: the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls have launched a five-year multi-million dollar project to put them on the Web. Specifically,
the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written.Eventually all the fragments will be available to view online, with transcriptions, translations, scholarly interpretations and bibliographies provided for academic study. “The aim in the end is that you can go online and call up the scrolls with the best possible resolution and all the information that exists about them today,” said Pnina Shor, head of the Artefacts Treatment and Conservation Department at the antiquities authority. “We want to provide opportunities for future research on the scrolls. We feel it’s part of our duty to expose them to the world as a whole.”
This is truly splendid, and should be a huge boon to biblical and historical scholarship—especially as it’s already produced unexpected side benefits:
The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. “The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see,” said Tanner. “We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars.” The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together.