Behind the hands that wrote the Bible

Un grupo de investigadores ha podido confirmar, con la ayuda de un sistema de inteligencia artificial, que el principal pergamino de los Manuscritos del Mar Muerto fue redactado por dos escribas diferentes. A pesar de que su estilo de escritura era casi idéntico, encontraron sutiles diferencias que dividen en dos uno de los textos religiosos más antiguos. Aunque la identidad concreta de los autores no pueda saberse, las máquinas han abierto un nuevo camino en el estudio de unos documentos que atestiguan, se sea creyente o no, una de las bases de la cultura occidental.

Dead Sea manuscripts are also known as the Rolls of Qumrán, in reference to a riverside area of the Judea desert (West Bank) where they were found.The former were discovered in 1947 a Bedouinos in one of the caves in the region.And they still appear.For many they are one of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century.Written in Hebrew, Aramaic and a few in Greek, those of religious content are the basis of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament of Christians.His finding meant delaying the oldest versions in a thousand years, which were from the Middle Ages.Writings between the third century BC AND II OF THIS ERA, Most are very fragmented.Its content has been studied, its implications for the canonical versions of the different Bibles and even the material where they were written.About their authors almost nothing is known.

MLADEN POPOVIC, director of the QumRán Institute of the University of Groninga (Netherlands), tries to identify them by their writing.This paleographer has been studying the manuscripts for two decades.He started during his doctorate led by the Spanish and world expert in the rolls, Florentino García Martínez.Since 2015, Popovic directs a project funded by the European Research Council.Combining artificial intelligence, paleography and carbon dating 14, the name of the plan says everything about its intentions: the hands that wrote the Bible.And to identify them, Popovic has trusted the machines.

"We have discovered that not one if not two scribes copied the big roll of Isaiah," says Popovic.This roll is one of Qumrán's jewels.It is the longest biblical manuscript, with 7.34 meters of parchment, the best preserved of all and the only almost complete, in this case of Isaiah's book.Carbon 14 and paleographic tests indicate that they should write it in the second century to.C."They shared a very similar writing style, which made the human eye difficult to distinguish them along such a large roll," adds Popovic.

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The distinction has been made with several layers of artificial intelligence that have gone from the most general, distinguish the trace of the animal skin substrate, to the smallest, detect the almost imperceptible differences when writing each of the letters."We can't see the 5.000 versions of a character, the Aleph [the first letter of the Hebrew Alefato], for example, and compare whether one or more groups, ”explains Popovic.That left it to the machines, which scanned all the ways in which the letters of the text appeared.For example, they studied the 5.011 times that appears Aleph.

“Another advantage of using the computer as an intelligent assistant is that he can do all kinds of pixel calculations that we cannot and that on the simple, but fundamental premise, that writing is based on the specific muscle movement of the person andAs such can be quantified, ”Popovic completes.All the details, results and conclusions of this work appear in the latest edition of the Scientific Journal PLOS One.

The professor of artificial intelligence and cognitive engineering at the University of Groninga Lambert Schomaker and his Pupil Maruf Dhali were responsible for putting a digital copy of a text of almost 2 ago.200 years against 21st century machines.His mission was to distinguish the differences, if there were, of stroke, of force when writing it, of distance between the letters or the curvature of each character."Our Dhali doctoral student noted that data points clouds were grouped in two," says Schomaker."These regions seem to correspond approximately with the first and second part of the series of columns that form the text," he adds.The manuscript of Isaiah's book is written in 54 columns and is from 27 when the styles differ.

"Using another method decomposing the letters into fragments and comparing them with a reference table, I could confirm that there was a transition around half of the series," says Schomaker.To be sure, they submitted the images to a third test, introducing random modifications.“We confirmed the results again: the difference between left and right was still detected in the series.These results were delivered to Professor Popovic, ”says Schomaker.

Popovic clarifies that this codicological separation was already known, "but now there are concrete evidence that there was also a change of scribes from this point".The paleographer adds: "The fact that two scribes wrote so similarly tells us [aspects] about their formation or origin".In addition, this work goes beyond how many wrote this manuscript.For the paleographer “it is only the first step, we have opened the door to the micronive of individual scribes;This will open new possibilities to study all the scribes of the Dead Sea rolls ”.

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