How old are the Dead Sea Roles? An AI model can help

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Economist 3 min read 29 Sept 2025, 01:30 IST Tourists stand in the waters of the Dead Sea, considered the earth’s lowest point, during a heatwave in Israel on August 13, 2025 Reuters/Sinan Abu Maizer (Reuters) Summary Scientists use it to calculate the age of the old and the dead sea. evaded. Debate raged about their exact age. The scrolls, which contain the earliest surviving copies of books from the Hebrew Bible and other religious texts, mostly in Aramaic and Hebrew, are presumably composed between 300 BC and 200 AD. Dating to each of the 1,000 individual roles will help historians understand how literacy spreads among ancient Jewish population groups and the first Christians, and provides a valuable window in the origin of the sacred texts. But scholars who hope to do so have little, but their own intuition to trust. Until now. In an article published in Plos One on June 4, scientists report that a new model for artificial intelligence (AI) can date antique scrolls based on the style of handwriting they contain. This is possible because writing can change in different ways, even within a few generations (a very grieving modern example is the decrease in italics). Scholars are already looking for such differences to estimate the age of ancient documents, but the degree of subjectivity involved means that different experts often draw conflicting conclusions. The new AI model offers the promise to standardize the discipline. This draws its conclusions by accurately measuring small angles and curves within individual letters, as well as identifying patterns over larger pieces of text, in ways that people cannot do. It also allows the calculations to be investigated, which the researchers will lead to more objective date estimates. The model has indeed made several interesting findings. The model, called Enoch, was developed by a team led by Mladen Popovic, a scholar of religion from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. To calibrate the model, Dr. Popovic and his team withdrew small samples from 24 of the Dead Sea Roles and dated carbon. The team then fed the carbon date estimates, as well as 62 scanned images of the dated scrolls. Their intention was to enable the model to find relationships between forms and patterns in the scanned script and the estimate of the physical age given by the carbon date. The team then ratified the model by giving it extra, unseen scans of the carbon -dated scrolls as a test; It was strong, and offered age groups that largely overlapped with the carbon dating results. Enoch was then provided with images of 135 undated scrolls and asked to offer dates. The age groups that gave it were generally between 50 and 100 years older than human estimates. The most striking of the new dates relates to two scrolls containing fragments of the biblical books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. Historians believe that the original text of the book Daniel was completed somewhere about 160 BC and the book of Ecclesiastes in the third century BC. Enoch suggests that the versions found in the Dead Sea Rolls were also written around those times. Dr Popovic says although the scrolls are unlikely to be written by the original writers of the Bible – an assessment he did based on the quality of the screenplay – they could have been contemporary copies, perhaps knocked down while scribes listened to the originals read aloud. The result is certainly further investigation. Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham, who used AI models to restore and explain the AI ​​models, and who did not use at work, says an AI model that can help scholars that manuscripts ‘are an important contribution’, says Thea Somerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham. -Models to restore and explain ancient Greek inscriptions. Dr Popovic hopes that one day models such as Enoch will be able to help antique manuscript collections in any language. It will take time to collect enough data to train similar models for other scripts. For the time being, Dr Popovic is happy to reduce the big role played by bowel feelings in paleography. “Sometimes,” he says, “our human mind is more a black box than … the AI ​​model we built.” Curious about the world? Sign in to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber newsletter, just to enjoy the scientific coverage of science. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Kartic Intelligence Read the following story