Dead Sea Scrolls

The story of how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered could have been dreamed up for an Indiana Jones movie. In 1947, Bedouin shepherds searching for a stray goat in the Judean desert entered a cave, where they stumbled across seven earthenware jars.

Inside the jars were rolled up manuscripts, bearing ancient writing. The find set archaeologists on a search that lasted nearly a decade and yielded around 900 scrolls and thousands of fragments from 11 of the caves near the Dead Sea.

Written in Hebrew and Aramaic and dating from the second century BC to the first century AD, they contain some of the oldest Old Testament texts known, as well as non-biblical writings on subjects such as the law and waging war.

Like other ancient documents that are rolled up for storage, the Dead Sea Scrolls are incredibly fragile. So fragile, in fact, that large sections have never been read. Over time, parchment made from animal skin literally turns to jelly. Attempting to unroll manuscripts in this state could destroy them forever.

But now British scientists believe they may have a way to unlock hidden secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by scanning them with powerful X-rays. The idea is to shoot beams of X-rays through the rolls from different angles.

Because the ink used to write on the parchment contains iron, it should create a "shadow" in the same way as bones do when an X-ray is taken at hospital. The information is digitally fed into a computer, which unscrambles it to "unroll" the manuscript and produce text that can be read.
In tests, the technique has worked with 80% accuracy.

Ordinary X-rays will not do, however. They have to be the kind of super-intense beams produced by the Diamond Light Source (DLS) in Didcot, Oxfordshire - a particle accelerator the size of five football pitches that generates X-rays a billion times brighter than those used in hospital.

X-rays are merely a high energy form of light. At the DLS, the beams are created by accelerating electrons around a doughnut-shaped ring at enormous speeds and bending their path with powerful magnets. The electrons then leak energy in the form of X-rays and other types of light.

Professor Tim Wess, whose team is developing the scroll-reading technique at the University of Cardiff, has already used the DLS to transcribe a number of 18th century Scottish legal documents from the National Archive.


In future, he hopes to probe much more ancient manuscripts, as well as classical musical scores written by composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. But the most ambitious goal is to open up hidden passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Torah, the most revered Jewish text which is said to record the word of God as revealed to Moses.

Speaking earlier this month at the BA Festival of Science at York University, he said: "There are some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that haven’t been unrolled, and there are parts of the Torah that haven’t been seen as well."


With the next three or four years, he also hopes to overcome the much more difficult challenge of reading ancient books without turning their fragile pages. The Diamond X-rays can also be used to investigate how delicate and easily damage documents are, and how they should be preserved, said Prof Wess.