European Grant Funds Five-Year Study of Dead Sea Scrolls Origins

The European Research Council awarded scrolls scholar Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen a €2.5 million grant to lead a five-year international project called Tracing Scribes and Scrolls. Haaretz reported that the project will analyze about 250 samples from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection to determine where the manuscripts were produced and copied.

Participating institutions include the Israel Antiquities Authority, the universities of Pisa and Naples, and the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

The Israel Antiquities Authority stated on July 1 that the origins of the scrolls will shed light on biblical-era scribal culture and the transmission of knowledge in Judea. An international collaboration aided by the AI program Enoch previously showed that some scrolls date as early as the 4th or 3rd centuries B.C.E. and others as late as the 2nd century C.E.

About three-quarters of the scrolls are written in different forms of Hebrew, most of the rest in Aramaic, and some in Greek. The corpus consists of four almost complete scrolls and about 25,000 fragments believed to have originated in perhaps 900 scrolls. For the first time, papyruses from Egypt will be examined alongside papyri from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites.

Ilit Cohen-Ofri of the Israel Antiquities Authority stated that most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on parchment, with the exception of the Copper Scroll, and the rest on papyrus. She added that the ink used in the scrolls checked so far is soot, though isolated words and phrases such as the divine name in some scrolls were written in scarlet ink made mainly of cinnabar.

Maruf Dhali from Groningen is leading a part of the project that will use AI to process the chemical data and seek patterns in the writing.