From papyrus to cyberspace: Israel to make Dead Sea Scrolls available online

Sections of the ancient Dead Sea scrolls
The project to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls could take five years and will cost millions of dollars. Photograph: Reuters

Scientists and scholars in Jerusalem have begun a programme to take the first high-resolution, digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls so they can be made available to the public on the internet.

The Israel Antiquities Authority this week ends a pilot project that prepares the way for a much larger operation to photograph the 15-20,000 fragments that make up the 900 scrolls which were discovered 60 years ago by shepherds in caves close to the Dead Sea.

The scrolls were first photographed in the 1950s, after their discovery, and have since then been kept in specially monitored conditions in a vault in Jerusalem. Only four specially-trained curators are allowed to handle them.

Now, in a project that could take five years and will cost millions of dollars, the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written.

Eventually all the fragments will be available to view online, with transcriptions, translations, scholarly interpretations and bibliographies provided for academic study. "The aim in the end is that you can go online and call up the scrolls with the best possible resolution and all the information that exists about them today," said Pnina Shor, head of the Artefacts Treatment and Conservation Department at the antiquities authority. "We want to provide opportunities for future research on the scrolls. We feel it's part of our duty to expose them to the world as a whole."

Written around 2,000 years ago, the scrolls contain the oldest written record of the Old Testament. They contain almost all the Old Testament books, often with more than one copy of each, as well as other religious material that came afterwards and writings from a religious sect dating to the time of Jesus. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, with some written on papyrus, both of which are extremely fragile and brittle and which age and darken over time.

The work is carried out under particular conditions in a small laboratory, with chilled air and walls painted grey to provide the correct light. Among those helping are Simon Tanner, an academic from King's College, London, who has worked on more than 500 other digitalisation projects around the world, and Greg Bearman, a retired scientist who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and with NASA.

Already the work has brought to light new revelations about the scrolls. The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. "The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see," said Tanner. "We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars." The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together.

The imaging spectroscopy, borrowing a technology used by NASA, will for the first time allow the condition of the scrolls to be properly monitored, including their water content, in a non-invasive way and to aid conservation by detecting any changes in the scrolls before they become visible to the curators.