Google Brings the Dead Sea Scrolls To the Digital Age

skade88 writes "Google has been working to bring many old manuscripts to the internet at high resolution for all to see. From their announcement: 'A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Today, we're helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before.'"

Comments

Some extra info

[butalearner]

I can't find the percentage of identified vs. unidentified, but among the identified scrolls:

40% are copies of text from the Hebrew Bible
30% are copies of texts not canonized in the Hebrew Bible (i.e. fanfiction) from the Second Temple Period like the Books of Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, and additional psalms
30% are "sectarian manuscripts" - texts that describe rules or a set of beliefs held by certain groups within Judaism.

Re:Some extra info

[Black Parrot]

30% are copies of texts not canonized in the Hebrew Bible (i.e. fanfiction)

I don't think you can characterize ancient texts that way. Canonization is a complex "theopolitical" process, and what gets in and what is left out doesn't necessarily have much to do with its quality, or who wrote it, or when (unless of course it was written after the canonization process was complete.) It's mostly a matter of whether the influential people in the society that does the canonization think a document supports their views or conflicts with them.

Re:Not interesting....

[lucm]

Talk about throwing pearls to the pigs... You must be one of those entitled Gen-Y.

Here is an idea that would be "worth your time" [1]: why don't you build an internet company that is worth billions of dollars then use some of the profits to fund a project where Leonardo Da Vinci's manuscripts are being found (or made available), digitized and published online for all to see?

I suspect that the day you accomplish that, your opinion about the Dead Sea scrolls will have a bigger impact. Meanwhile feel free to tweet about it, I'm sure your 8 followers will be delighted, you may even get a Like if posted on Facebook.

[1] with those quotes around "worth your time" I hope to convey how annoyed I get by reading the part of your comment where you talk about things that are worth spending your time with.

Re:Are we any smarter than we were 2000 years ago?

[Black Parrot]

Mod parent up. If these fragments were truly the word of god, then surely they would contain useful information that would increase our knowledge of the world/universe and would remain true even today. Instead, we get re-worked fables plagiarized from other sources, tribal customs codified into law, doomsday prophecies, and rants against various enemies (all of which the old testament is full of).

[emphasis mine]

Your claim probably makes sense to a lot of people in modern industrialized societies, but actually depends on a lot of assumptions about what a god would want.

Re:Are we any smarter than we were 2000 years ago?

[Empiric]

"Correlation does not imply causation" is a clear concept here at Slashdot--unless the topic is religion. In that case, any broad correlation is fully sufficient to demonstrate that Worldview X "stole" its concepts from Worldview Y.

But, let's get serious. Cite your primary-source documents, showing even the level of correlation, so that the evaluation of independent individuals, rather than your dogmatic posturing, can evaluate their relevance within the context of -overall- similarity.