The Dead Sea Scrolls are the only surviving Biblical documents written before the 2nd century, A.D., and according to a new announcement, they may contain more information than previously thought. Using NASA-developed technology, a team of researchers have begun to decipher texts on the scrolls that could not be read with the naked eye. The team, led by archeologist Pnina Shor of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project, found text on fragments originally excavated in 1956. Since their discovery 62 years ago, the texts have been stored in cigar boxes, their purposes unknown. But on Tuesday, Shor and her team announced that the discovered words on at least one of the 2,000-year-old fragments “raises the possibility that it belonged to a still unknown manuscript.”
To unlock the faded text, researchers turned to multi-spectral imaging, which captures image data within wavelengths that range across the electromagnetic spectrum and extracts high-resolution information that the human eye cannot pick up. There are still 20 boxes of unexamined hundreds of parchment and papyrus fragments, so the hope is that this technology will reveal even more about the history of that period in the years to come.
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