The famous Dead Sea Scrolls have stunned scientists with their antiquity

Experts say many of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously thought. Researchers have used artificial intelligence and radiocarbon dating to take a fresh look at the ancient texts.

Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously thought, and some biblical texts date back to the time of their original authors, researchers say.

The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the Qumran caves in the Judean Desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-20th century, The Guardian reports. The manuscripts range from legal documents to fragments of the Hebrew Bible and are thought to date from around the third century BC to the second century AD.

Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to take a fresh look at the dates of individual scrolls - findings that experts say could upend ideas about when, where and by whom they were made.

“It’s like a time machine. So we can shake hands with these people who lived 2,000 years ago, and now we can transport them back in time much better,” says Professor Mladen Popovic, the study’s author from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Although some of the scrolls were radiocarbon dated in the 1990s, Popovich said scientists had not addressed the issue of castor oil contamination, a substance used in the 1950s to help experts read the manuscripts but which could have skewed the results.

Furthermore, many scrolls have been dated only through handwriting analysis.

In a paper published in the journal Plos One, the team of researchers outline how they attempted to radiocarbon date 30 samples from different manuscripts found at four sites, thought to span five centuries. Crucially, the team first cleaned the samples to remove castor oil contamination.

The researchers successfully radiocarbon dated 27 samples, finding that while two were younger than handwriting analysis suggested, many were older.

Among other finds, the researchers found that two different writing styles known as the Hasmonean and Herodian scripts coexisted for much longer than previously thought, while a sample from a manuscript called 4Q114, which contains verses from the Book of Daniel, was older than traditional paleography had suggested.

"Previously, it was dated to the end of the second century BC, that is, one generation after the author of the Book of the Prophet Daniel. Now, thanks to our research, we go back in time, to the era contemporary with this author," notes Mladen Popovic.

The team then used a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning to create a model they named Enoch, after the biblical figure associated with scientific knowledge. The team trained Enoch by feeding it 62 digital images of ink marks from 24 radiocarbon-dated manuscripts, along with their carbon-14 dates.

The scientists then tested the model by showing Enoch 13 more images from the same manuscripts. In 85 percent of cases, the model gave an age that matched the radiocarbon dates, and in many cases, it gave a narrower range of likely dates than that obtained by radiocarbon dating alone.

“What we have created is a very robust tool, based on empirical experience, based on physics and geometry,” comments Professor Popovich.

When Enoch was presented with images from 135 undated manuscripts he had not seen before, 79 percent of them were dated realistically, according to expert paleographers. Popovic added that those deemed unrealistic may have contained problematic data, such as poor-quality images.

The system has already provided new data, including that the copy of the biblical book Ecclesiastes dates back to the time of the book's supposed author.

Popovich said Enoch meant that the age of other scrolls could now be determined without radiocarbon dating, a process that requires destroying small samples.

“There are more than 1,000 manuscripts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, so our study is a first but important step that opens the door to history with new possibilities for research,” Popovic said.

Emeritus Professor Joan Taylor of King's College London believes the findings will have a major impact on Qumran studies. "These results mean that most of the manuscripts found in the caves near Qumran were not written at the site of Qumran, which was occupied later," she said.

However, Dr Matthew Collins, from the University of Chester, cautioned that radiocarbon dating only sheds light on the age of the parchment, not when it was written, while it also raises questions about how stylistically representative the small number of teaching samples were of different time periods. “Overall, this is an important and welcome study that could provide us with an important new tool in our arsenal for dating these texts,” he said. “However, we must use it with caution and in careful combination with other evidence.”