Scientists Unlock Secrets of 1700-Year-Old Biblical En-Gedi Scroll From the Dead Sea

A team of researchers has successfully deciphered a severely damaged En-Gedi scroll through virtual unwrapping, revealing that the ancient scroll from the Dead Sea is, in fact, the oldest known copy of a Pentateuchal book from the Hebrew Bible.

The charred En-Gedi scroll was unearthed in 1970 in the western part of the Dead Sea. The said scroll could not be unrolled or opened as it was already carbonized; however, archeologists tucked it away for safekeeping, hoping that advanced technology in the future could decipher the scroll, New York Times reports.

Luckily, computer scientists from the University of Kentucky have figured out a way of knowing what's written in the Dead Sea scroll through a technology called virtual unwrapping. According to the study published in the journal Science Advances, the technique non-invasively unrolls the scroll by using high-resolution on scanning and creating a 3D image of the scroll.

The artifact goes through several scanning processes. It first acquires a 3D volumetric scan of the manuscript, producing cross-sectional images of the scroll and its layers. Next, the 3D volumetric model will be passed in a virtual unwrapping pipeline, where they would scan each section of the manuscript, flatten it, and rescan it to extract the ink from the data in a process called texturing.

Through this breakthrough technology, historians can now know what the ancient dead scroll is without physically unrolling and crumbling the artifact. Results showed that the text written in the scroll reveals a part of the Book of Leviticus from the Hebrew Bible.

Through their new technology, Professor Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky and his team presented a master image of the virtually unrolled Dead Sea scroll featuring 35 lines of text.

"We are releasing all our data for the scroll from En-Gedi: the scans, our geometric analysis, the final texture. We think that the scholarly community will have interest in the data and the process as well as our results," Seales said as per Science Daily.

This new technology opens up new possibilities to further understand the past by analyzing artifacts, such as the En-Gedi scroll, that have been damaged over time.

 "There are so many other unique and exciting materials that may yet give up their secrets -- we are only beginning to discover what they may hold," Seales concluded.