Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have announced a joint venture to document the entire collection of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls and make it freely accessible on the Internet.
The IAA and Google and said that the collection ― 30,000 fragments comprising 900 manuscripts ― will be photographed in its entirety for the first time since the 1950s. The $3.5 million project will be funded by Leon Levy Foundation, Arcadia Fund and Yad Hanadiv Fund, according to Haaretz.
The collection will initially be documented with cutting-edge imaging technologies to form a digital library. Google's R&D centre in Israel will then upload the images to the internet and accompany them with databases, including transcriptions and translations in several languages and formats.
The scrolls, housed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem since 1967, are the oldest known surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, dating back to the Second Temple period. Written on parchment in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, they are traditionally identified with the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, and are considered one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th Century.
The first Dead Sea Scroll fragments were discovered in 1946 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, about 60 km south of Jerusalem. After the initial discovery, tens of thousands of fragments were found in 11 caves nearby. About 30,000 of these have been photographed by the antiquities authority, along with the earlier finds. Together, they make up more than 900 manuscripts.
"We are putting together the past and the future in order to enable all of us to share it," Pnina Shor, an official with Israels Antiquities Authority, told the Associated Press (AP). Putting the scroll online will give scholars unlimited time with the pieces of parchment and may lead to new hypotheses. "This is the ultimate puzzle that people can now rearrange and come up with new interpretations," she said.
"Imagine a world where everybody with an internet connection is able to access the most important works of human history," Google's Israel R&D director Yossi Mattias said. He said the project would build on similar efforts by Google to put the public domain material of several European libraries online.
