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2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls go online
JERUSALEM (AP) – Two thousand years after they were written and
decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the
world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time on
Monday in a project launched by Israel's national museum and web
giant Google.
Dr. Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and head of
the Shrine of the Book, points at the original Isaiah scroll found
in Qumaran caves in the Judean Desert and dated around 120 BC at
the Israel Museum on Monday in Jerusalem.
The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on
the Internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the
celebrated manuscripts — who were once criticized for allowing
them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars — to make them
available to anyone with a computer.
The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript
known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Surfers can search
high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom
in and out, and translate verses into English.
The originals are kept in a secured vault in a Jerusalem building
constructed specifically to house the scrolls. Access requires at
least three different keys, a magnetic card and a secret code.
The five scrolls are among those purchased by Israeli researchers
between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers, having first been
found by Bedouin shepherds in the Juddvean Desert.
The scrolls, considered by many to be the most significant
archaeological find of the 20th century, are thought to have been
written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem
for the desert 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks
of the Dead Sea. The hundreds of manuscripts that survived,
partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light on
the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of
Christianity.
The most complete scrolls are held by the Israel Museum, with more
pieces and smaller fragments found in other institutions and
private collections. Tens of thousands of fragments from 900 Dead
Sea manuscripts are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority,
which has begun its own project to put them online in conjunction
with Google. That project, aimed chiefly at scholars, is set to be
complete by 2016, at which point nearly all of the scrolls will be
available on the Internet.