On some fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which for a long time were considered empty, hidden text was found that scientists did not notice.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient religious manuscripts from the third century BC. They were discovered in the 1940s, but scientists still know very little about them.
Thanks to an accidental discovery in the UK, scientists realized that some of the blank fragments of the scrolls, which had been stored for more than 20 years at the University of Manchester, contain ancient inscriptions that are invisible to the eye. We managed to see them in other spectra.
The fragments were donated by the government of Jordan to leather and parchment expert Ronald Reed at the University of Leeds in the 1950s. Since the scrolls had no text, they were considered uninteresting to science.
In 1997, the Reed collection was donated to the University of Manchester. More recently, historian and archaeologist Joan Taylor from King's College London, having examined the fragments, realized that this was not just an empty parchment. “Looking at one of the fragments through a magnifying glass, I saw a small faded Lamed - the Hebrew letter L,” says Taylor.
The four fragments were later found to contain readable text in Hebrew and Aramaic, written in carbon-based ink.
The research is ongoing - we should know the results very soon. So far, scientists have identified four lines of partially saved text, each of which consists of 15-16 letters.
Kirill Panov
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