The Dead Sea Scrolls collection runs to about nine hundred and thirty manuscripts, comprising thousands of fragments. Every physical examination costs something: exposure, handling, slow damage. Scholars still need to read them, and so does everybody else. The set out to resolve that with the Leon Levy Digital Library, in partnership with Google. What does the imaging actually do?
Two jobs at once. The MegaVision system images every fragment at the highest possible resolution and in multiple wavelengths, producing images equal in quality to viewing the physical scrolls, which removes the need to expose them repeatedly. The same multispectral approach allows long-term monitoring for preservation without touching anything, and wavelengths recover traces of writing that have faded to invisibility.
The collection is about nine hundred and thirty manuscripts made up of thousands of fragments, and every one of them is fragile. The conflict is structural: scholarship requires looking, and looking degrades. Any solution has to produce something good enough to study in place of the object itself.
The imaging uses a MegaVision system that captures every fragment in the highest resolution possible and across various wavelengths. The Authority describes the resulting images as equal in quality to physically viewing the scrolls, which is the claim the whole project rests on, since it is what eliminates the need for repeated exposure.
also buy something the eye cannot. Near-infrared wavelengths recover traces of writing that have faded to invisibility over the years, so fragments that look blank or partial in ordinary light give up text. The same images support long-term monitoring for preservation, precisely and by means.
The access side is the point of the partnership. Working with Google’s research center in Israel, the Authority has put hundreds of images online for anyone anywhere, with many thousands more to follow, eventually accompanied by transcriptions, translations and detailed bibliography. A lead gift from the Leon Levy Foundation made it possible, with support from the Arcadia Fund and Yad Hanadiv.
wat. Photograph it well enough and nobody needs to open it again, which is how the scrolls get read and kept at once.
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Conservation and access usually pull against each other. Imaging good enough to replace a physical viewing resolves the conflict instead of splitting the difference.
How do we know?
The Israel Antiquities Authority describes the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, its funding, its partnership with Google and the imaging technology behind it.
What is still unknown
An institutional description of a project in progress. It states what the technology enables rather than reporting how much faded text has in fact been recovered.
Learn something?
Where to next
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