Media News - Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Soon to be available on the Web: Dead Sea Scrolls

In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file - among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth - available to all on the Internet. Equipped with highly powerful cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have real scholarly impact. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. The entire collection was photographed only once before - in the 1950s using infrared and those photographs are stored in a climate-controlled room since they show things already lost from some of the scrolls. The old infrared pictures will also be scanned in the new digital effort. (International Herald Tribune)

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