The Dead Sea manuscripts have been written earlier than what was believed, in accordance with AI | Science | EUROtoday

They are greater than a thousand, a lot of them fragmented, and have been a puzzle for many years. Now, a man-made intelligence system has given 100 manuscripts of the Dead Sea, the oldest texts which are, each for Jews and Christians. Trained with just a few rolls dated with the carbon-14 approach, the brand new machine has superior its writing between 50 and 150 years earlier than what was believed. In a job revealed in PLoS ONEthe creators of this AI consider that their mixture with the normal paleography (the examine of historic texts) and radiocarbon courting may remedy the puzzle and order the remaining a whole lot, which might make clear one of many foundational moments of two of the nice human cultures.

“Indeed, many manuscripts are prior to what was supposed,” says Mladec Popović, director of the Qumrán Institute of the University of Groninga (Netherlands) and co -author of this analysis. Enoch It is the AI ​​that their colleagues from the Bernoulli Institute of Artificial Intelligence of the identical University have created. Popović has been learning the so -called Qumrán rolls for many years, first supported by paleographic instruments, now with AI. “Enoch [Enoc, en español] It is mentioned in the Bible, Genesis 5, where it is said that he walked with God and no longer existed, ”says Popović. The authors of ancient Judaism wrote how the Archangel Uriel showed him how the cosmos worked.“ This literature is a kind of ancient science in Judaism. I thought it would be appropriate to name our prediction model in honor of Enoch”He adds.

Popović points out that “analysis just isn’t restricted to stating that every one manuscripts are between 50 and 100 years older.” Even more relevant to him, it is “his capability up to now particular person manuscripts, which permits particulars and nuances,” he details. This greater chronological precision for each of the rolls and not for the whole, “may change, for instance, the angle of recent lecturers in regards to the growth of particular concepts in that interval,” Popović ends. Until now, it was considered that the set of manuscripts had been written in 250 before Christ and 60 after Christ.

A Enoch They trained him by presenting copies of 25 manuscripts that had been previously dated with the carbon-14 technique. Writings about lamb skin (although there are a few papyri, of plant origin), took 7 milligrams of each parchment to date them with the main tool that scientists have to know the date of any biological material, whether it is a human bone or an extended piece of animal leather. On that strut, the AI ​​worked as an artificial paleographer, not analyzing the content, but the shape of the text, its stroke or the form of the letter, whether written in Imperial Aramaic or in Hebrew square or Ashurí (a writing arising between the Jews of Babylon). He chronologically well placed 24 of the 25.

Once trained, Enoch He had to face the digitized copy of 135 of the little more than a thousand rolls that have been found in the caves that surround the dead sea since, in the middle of the last century, some Bedouins would find the first. After dating each of them, he could place them chronologically. A group of human paleographers reviewed their results, finding that 79% of their dates were realistic. For the authors, AI offers objectivity to a discipline, the paleography, very subjective.

It is not the first time that this group of researchers use AI to study the Rolls of Qumrán. In 2021 they published their work on the Great Roll of Isaiah, the largest parchment, with its six meters in length, and that collects the homonymous book of both the Jewish Tanach and the Christian Bible. Then, AI discovered that the text had been written by two different scribes. “There are similarities between both methods:” The use of small details in the shape of the ink line is very similar. However, we use this information in Isaiah to find evidence of two possible writers, while with Enoch, we use a processing step (called regression) to estimate the position of the manuscripts throughout the timeline, “explains the professor of the Bernoulli Institute of synthetic intelligence and co -author of the work, Lambert Schomaker.

Another extra apparent benefit provided Enoch It just isn’t damaging the rolls. “Now we can estimate the date of manuscripts without the need to cut with scissors a valuable fragment of papyrus or sheep skin for chemical treatment and physical experiment that constitutes the dating by carbon,” says Schomaker. In addition, AI works with digitized copies. “The recognition of patterns, on the other hand, is not destructive; we simply use scanned images; paper is not needed or destroyed,” he says.

The final nice fortress of Enoch is that they provide it to the remainder of the students of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea. Popović advances that they use the AI ​​for the rolls to which they’ve entry, “but the ENOH tool is now available for scholars around the world, so that they can also work with it and date individual manuscripts whose date they wish to know.”

On the historic implications of his findings, Popović remembers that it’s nonetheless too early. “As a proof, we apply the tool to 135 manuscripts of the existing more than 1,000. Therefore, we cannot give a definitive answer about how our findings change our understanding of the period”, however the veteran paleographologist is satisfied that combining AI, courting by radiocarbon and conventional human evaluation, you might reply the query that has been requested for years: “The importance of these results of these results is They allow to study the real hands that wrote the Bible because it provides us with clues about the social context of the production and dissemination of the text. ”