A new project combining carbon-14 dating and digital paleography might soon solve the riddle of the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The initiative, carried out at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, marks the first time in decades that a significant number of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments have undergone radiocarbon dating.
The scholars are still working on publishing their findings in an academic journal, but the project and some preliminary results were presented at a conference at the university last week.
In many instances, the new model confirmed the assessment of earlier researchers that some scrolls might be more ancient than previously thought.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a corpus of some 25,000 fragments unearthed in caves on the shores of the Dead Sea in the 1940s and 1950s. The artifacts include some of the most ancient manuscripts of the Bible, other religious texts that were not accepted in the canon and nonreligious writings.
Carbon-14, or radiocarbon, dating is a method of age determination that depends upon the decay to nitrogen of radiocarbon (carbon-14).
Because of the destructive nature of the analysis, which requires sacrificing a sliver of the parchment, the Antiquities Authority (IAA) has been very hesitant to allow this kind of research. The IAA is tasked with preserving the fragments.
A major carbon-14 project on some 14 fragments was carried out at the beginning of the 1990s.
Over the past few years, major technological advances have significantly reduced the impact of certain kinds of analysis on the physical preservations of the scrolls. As a result, the IAA, whose mission is to find the right balance between new research and the preservation of the scrolls for posterity, has allowed scholars to perform new work.
Some 30 scrolls have been subjected to the University of Groningen’s project. The results of 25 of them have been used to train a specific algorithm carrying out the paleographic analysis of the collection.
Paleography is the study of ancient or antiquated writings and inscriptions. In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been crucial to date the artifacts, which according to most scholars, date between the third century BCE and the first century CE.
However, several uncertainties have remained.
“When it comes to dating the manuscripts, there is the problem that for most of the period, we have no internally dated manuscripts, and the few that we have date from the outer ends of the timescale,” Prof. Mladen Popović, the head of Groningen’s Qumran Institute and the leader of the project, said at the conference.
During the course of their research, the scholars discovered that some of the manuscripts they had already considered were more ancient than previously thought. The development might have major implications for the field.
They also realized that the scribal practices developed in a less-standardized and consistent manner than earlier experts had envisioned.
“With regard to dating the manuscripts, the data from our model shows that there was not a nice continuous progression and development of characters, but rather that sometimes there was a lot of development and sometimes not so much,” Popović said. “The characters were not developing in a linear homogeneous manner throughout these periods.”
“Our paleographers will say that they can date Dead Sea Scrolls with a precision of 25 to 50 years’ date range, and [the research] is yet to substantiate their model,” he said. “Pending new data in the future, we dare say that we have a model that works consistently and is able to date manuscripts with an empirically based precision that was not possible before. This is a huge advance for the field.”