According to a new study using artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics, a famous manuscript of the Dead Sea Scroll (translated as Dead Sea Scroll) is written. by just one but two people.
A manuscript of the “Dead Sea Scroll” is displayed in Hong Kong. The analysis showed that the two scribes wrote in such a way that the difference between the two could not be seen with the naked eye, a detail that the note takers may have had the same training, yes can be at a school or in a social setting. “This is just the first step,” said lead investigator Mladen Popović, professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said. new ability to study all of the scribes behind the “Dead Sea Scroll” and put us in a new position and better able to understand the manuscript collection. ” The “Dead Sea Scroll” was first discovered in the late 1940s, when a young shepherd searching for a stray goat found several manuscripts in a cave in Qumran, on the West Bank. Over the next decade, researchers and local Bedouins found more than 900 manuscripts in 11 caves. These manuscripts are the oldest surviving surviving texts of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the fourth century BC to the second century AD, but who is unknown or even how much. many wrote them, because the scribes did not sign them. That doesn’t stop Bible scholars from guessing how many people participated in writing the various drafts of the Dead Sea Scroll. Researchers will try to find clues in handwriting, such as a very specific feature in a letter that will identify the scribe. Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen and his colleagues used a different approach: AI and statistics to investigate the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of seven original scroll manuscripts found. by the shepherd Bedouin. The well-preserved scroll, dating to about 125 BC, is 7.3 m long and 26 cm high and contains 54 columns of Hebrew text. In particular, a point caught Popović’s eye; Between columns 27 and 28, there is a small gap in the text and a new “page” where the two sheets have been stitched together. Other researchers have debated whether the scroll was written by one or two scribes, and Popović’s team wants to see if they can solve the mystery. In fact, the team wanted to determine whether slight differences in writing should be considered normal variations in one scribe’s handwriting or similar scripts written by two other scribes. each other or not. The researchers’ methods have uncovered subtle and nuanced differences in handwriting that we cannot discern with the naked eye, Popović said. The discovery of two collaborative notes in the Great Isaiah Scroll, he said, suggests that ancient scribes were working in groups. The ancients knew how to work in groups When designing the algorithm, researchers must train artificial intelligence to distinguish text, or ink, from the background – animal skin or papyrus. This difference, called binarization, was designed by co-researcher Maruf Dhali, a PhD student in the department of artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen, who created an artificial neural network. This neural network recorded early ink traces on the manuscript, even as these ancient letters were transformed into digital images. Senior researcher Lambert Schomaker, professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen, said: “This is very important because ancient ink traces are directly related to the motor movement of one person and characterize each person ”. Neural network analysis revealed that 54 columns of text in the “Great Book of Isaiah” split into two separate groups, with a half-way transition in the manuscript. In this second analysis, Schomaker looked at small pieces, or sections of letters that would be more precise, distinctive, and informative to find a significant difference in shape compared to the symbols. full order. Next, the team performed a visual analysis by creating a “heat map”. These maps incorporate all variations of a given letter, such as the Hebrew letter aleph (א), found in the scroll. They then create an average version of the letter from the first 27 columns and another from the last 27 columns. They then compared these averaged letters and found that they could easily spot the difference between the two letters. Furthermore, the difference was statistically significant. Popović and his colleagues have other investigative plans, possibly revealing different backgrounds or training different scribes. These analyzes may also shed light on the communities that wrote the “Dead Sea Book”. This helps to better understand the so-called cultural evolution of the Hebrew Bible. The new research was published online April 21 in the journal PLOS One.
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