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An AI that analyzes ancient writings gives new estimates on the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

An AI that analyzes ancient writings gives new estimates on the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Artificial Intelligence is much more than what we as users know and use. Creating texts or images is all well and good, but the capabilities of this technology are so vast that they are being leveraged in various sectors for work and research that could revolutionize the world in terms of scientific, healthcare, and space research, to name a few examples.

This is often because, just as it takes AI a few seconds to write a 500-word text and a human an hour or more, for everything else this technology is much faster, which means it allows us to move forward much more quickly.

An example of this is the discoveries made by an AI called Enoch, which, thanks to recent research, has determined that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written much earlier than previously thought. The Dead Sea Scrolls, also known as the Qumran Scrolls, are a collection of ancient texts discovered in caves near the city of Qumran, in the West Bank, next to the Dead Sea.

Until now, it was believed that these were written between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. However, a new analysis that combined radiocarbon dating with AI, determined that some of the biblical manuscripts date back about 2,300 years , when their alleged authors lived, they point out in a publication in the journal Plos On.

"The Dead Sea Scrolls were extremely important when they were discovered, because they completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity," explains one of the authors of the text explaining the discovery.

In depth

The key that allowed the AI ​​to determine the dates of these texts lay in the type of handwriting used . To do this, the researchers used high-resolution images of such documents to train the AI, and the scientists presented Enoch with documents they had carbon-dated (the writing method used on the manuscripts).

The key was that they hid the dating information, and the AI ​​correctly guessed the age 85% of the time. "In several cases, the AI ​​even gave a narrower date range for the manuscripts." That's why the discoveries are so promising and reliable.

As AI suggests, these texts could be copies made during the lifetime of the books' original authors, which could mean that these manuscripts could have been written by the same authors of the Bible.

The authors assert that these findings will not only inspire new studies and impact historical reconstructions , but will also open up new perspectives in the analysis of historical manuscripts.

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