‘We see there is variation there, so they were not just slavish robots copying what they were told to copy.’ ‘Another example is how we look at those scribes - is there also some individuality or space for them to manoeuvre?’ said Prof Popović. A scribe was discovered who wrote both Hebrew manuscripts and Aramaic (an ancient language which was the lingua franca of the Middle East 2-3 000 years ago) ones, giving researchers new insights into their language abilities.
Dead sea naked models how to#
The ability to drill down to the handwriting of individual scribes and connect them with various works opens up a whole new way for researchers to look at texts, as well as understand their scribal culture.įor instance, there is evidence that some Dead Sea Scroll scribes were just learning how to write. Of course, we have this expertise, but we cannot explain all of our palaeographic reasoning.’īy using a trained computer, he says, palaeographers are challenged to better explain the observations they make with human eyes. ‘We don’t really know what goes on in our minds. ‘The human palaeographer, the expert, is much more of a black box,’ he said. While scholars had previously debated whether or not there were multiple writers of the Isaiah scroll, this was the first robust evidence that two scribes had produced it.Ĭould the AI be wrong? Less likely, according to Prof Popović. ‘One scribe is so good at imitating the other that, with the naked human eye, you can’t really see that.' ‘They write so alike, but the most likely explanation really is that there are two different scribes,’ said Prof Popović. Could he have changed his pen? Or had he perhaps stopped writing and picked up again much later? The researchers considered other options. It is your muscle movements and it is very individual. The way you write, the way I write, is very person-specific. While statistically significant, it was barely perceptible visually. It showed that, roughly halfway through the text of the Isaiah scroll, the handwriting changed enough to indicate another scribe took over. The results were 3D models of manuscript texts that include more than 5 000 dimensions of calculations.īack in a lab in the Netherlands, Maruf Dhali, one of the team members, was puzzled by the results the computer model was producing. Researchers spent many long hours painstakingly tracing Hebrew letters to teach a computer model what was ink and what was not. ‘The beauty of the technology we have now is that you can make high spectral images and go down to the pixel level, and then make all sorts of calculations which you can boil down to movement,’ Prof Popović said. ‘Through their handwriting, we can, as it were, shake hands with them.’ Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert Prof Lambert Schomaker and other team members as part of the Horizon-funded HandsandBible project, he developed new machine learning computing methods to analyse ancient handwriting digitally. ‘It is your muscle movements and it is very individual.’ ‘The way you write, the way I write, is very person-specific,’ Prof Popović said. Texts come on parchment but also pottery, metal, cloth and even casual graffiti as discovered on the walls of Pompeii.
The goal of the palaeographer is to identify the location and time of writing. Palaeography is the scientific study of ancient handwritten texts. ‘My simple idea was to use palaeography – their handwriting,’ he said. Though the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 70 years ago, sophisticated computing techniques are now revealing the invisible hands that wrote the famous texts and Professor Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen thinks he knows the answer. But was he finishing his own work – or someone else’s? His work, a copy of the biblical Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament, would soon be complete in the form of a seven-metre-long scroll. Around 2 100 years ago, a Judaean scribe deftly swirled a stylus to dab the final strokes of black ink onto a piece of parchment.
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