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AthanasiusKircher writes:

In the 1970s, some charred fragments of ancient scrolls were discovered inside the ark of a synagogue at En-Gedi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The archaeologists could not unroll them without destroying them, and it was doubtful any text would be legible. So they preserved the fragments in hope that one day better technology might come along.

That day is finally here, as computer scientists at the University of Kentucky have developed a technique to read them. Recently, we've seen news about being able to read closed books, but in the past couple years technology has revolutionized the field of classical studies by allowing "virtual unrolling" of ancient scrolls. The combination of a micro-CT scan and specialized software was developed as part of a project to allow scholars to read the scrolls from Herculaneum, an ancient town near Pompeii which was also destroyed in the volcanic eruption. The so-called "Villa of the Papyri" contains the only intact ancient library ever discovered and has so far yielded nearly 2000 ancient scrolls, mostly obscure and lost works associated with Epicurean philosophical ideas. (Excavation at Herculaneum is not currently active, but many scholars speculate there could be additional chambers in the villa, possibly with thousands of other lost ancient works.)

The most recent accomplishment with this technique is the reading of a biblical fragment from the En-Gedi synagogue. As Yosef Porath, a researcher involved in the original archaeological dig nearly a half-century ago, was preparing a final report on the charred scroll fragments, he asked Pnina Shor (the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls project at the Israel Antiquities Authority) to try making some high-resolution scans. Dr. Shor was skeptical, given the poor condition of the fragments (which looked like chunks of charcoal), but she included one fragment on a whim along with other objects she was submitting for cross-sectional scanning. She forwarded the results to W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has been working on the "virtual unrolling" software.

The results were striking. Not only did they obtain a clear and legible text, but it was also found to be the earliest extant fragment of the Hebrew Bible with an identical text to the medieval Masoretic Text used as the standard Hebrew edition today. The Masoretic text serves as the basis for most modern translations, and this recent find demonstrates a possible continuous stable text going back as much as 1700-2000 years. According to the researchers, it is also the first ancient biblical fragment recovered from the ark of a synagogue (as opposed to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were preserved in desert caves.)

Links to published studies:
Article on Technical Methodology and Findings
Article on Recovered Hebrew Text and Historical Significance

Original Submission