Israel discovers 7,000-year-old seal impression

Israeli archaeologists unveiled a 7,000-year-old clay seal impression used for commerce and protection of property, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) said.

A team of archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) made a rare discovery when they unearthed a small clay seal impression dating back some 7,000 years.

The impression, with two different geometric stamps imprinted on it, was discovered in Tel Tsaf, a prehistoric village located in Israel’s Beit She’an Valley in the country’s north.

The finding was uncovered as part of an excavation headed by HU’s Professor Yosef Garfinkel and two of his students, Professor David Ben Shlomo and Dr Michael Freikman, both of whom are currently researchers at Ariel University, between 2004 and 2007.

One hundred and fifty clay sealings were originally found at the site, with one being particularly rare and of distinct, historic importance. The object was published in the journal the Levant.

Sealings, also known as bulla, are little pieces of clay that were used in ancient times to seal and sign texts, preventing others from reading their contents.

The sealing discovered at Tel Tsaf is important because it is the first indication of the employment of seals to identify shipments or shutter silos or barns. When a barn door was opened, its seal impression would break – a telltale sign that someone had been there and that the contents inside had been touched or taken.

“Even today, similar types of sealing are used to prevent tampering and theft,” explained Garfinkel. “It turns out that this was already in use 7,000 years ago by landowners and local administrators to protect their property.”

The shard, which was less than a millimetre across, was discovered in excellent condition due to the dry environment of the Beit She’an valley. Symmetrical lines denote the sealing.

While many sealings discovered in the First Temple Jerusalem (about 2,600 years ago) incorporate a personal name and occasionally biblical figures, the sealing from Tel Tsaf dates from a time before writing was invented.

Instead of lettering, their seals were embellished with geometric designs. The presence of two separate stamps on the seal imprint may suggest a type of business operation in which two separate persons were participating.

The found fragment underwent extensive analysis before researchers could determine that it was indeed a seal impression.

According to Garfinkel, this is the earliest evidence that seals were used in Israel approximately 7,000 years ago to sign deliveries and keep store rooms closed. While seals have been found in that region dating back to 8,500 years ago, seal impressions from that time have not been found.

Based on a careful scientific analysis of the sealing’s clay, the researchers found it wasn’t locally sourced but came from a location at least ten kilometres away. Other archaeological finds at the site reveal evidence that the Tel Tsaf residents were in contact with populations far beyond ancient Israel.

“At this very site we have evidence of contact with peoples from Mesopotamia, Turkey, Egypt and Caucasia,” Garfinkel added. “There is no prehistoric site anywhere in the Middle East that reveals evidence of such long-distance trade in exotic items as what we found at this particular site.”

The site also yielded clues that the area was home to people of considerable wealth who built up large stores of ingredients and materials, indicating considerable social development.

This evidence points to Tel Tsaf as having been a key position in the region that served both local communities and people passing through.

“We hope that continued excavations at Tel Tsaf and other places from the same time period will yield additional evidence to help us understand the impact of a regional authority in the southern Levant,” concluded Garfinkel.

Preserved in poop: 1,000-year-old chicken egg found in Israel

Archaeologists discover an almost fully intact but nearly empty egg and three rare Islamic-period bone dolls in the excavation of settlement dating from the Byzantine period.

During recent digs in the central village of Yavne, archaeologists unearthed an exceedingly unusual, almost fully intact 1,000-year-old chicken egg, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The unexpected discovery was made during an IAA salvage excavation of a historic cesspit going back to the Islamic period, which was carried out ahead of a new neighbourhood construction.

Archaeologists were astounded to uncover a fragile ancient chicken egg that had been perfectly preserved a millennium ago by being originally pillowed in soft human dung within a cesspit, according to an IAA news statement.

“The egg’s unique preservation is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries, nestled in a cesspit containing soft human waste that preserved it,” IAA archaeologist Alla Nagorsky, the site’s excavation director, said. “Even today, eggs rarely survive for long in supermarket cartons. It’s amazing to think this is a 1,000-year-old find!”

Since the shell was slightly cracked, most of its contents leaked out, but part of the yoke was still inside, which will allow further analysis in the future.

Chicken has been raised in Israel for consumption of eggs and meat for some 2,300 years since the Hellenist period and early Roman period.

Bone assemblages in the land indicate that from the 7th century when the Islamic period began, pork consumption drastically decreased compared to previous centuries.

“Families needed a ready protein substitute that does not require cooling and preservation, and they found it in eggs and chicken meat,” Perry Gal said.

The egg further cracked when it was removed from the site, but was restored to its original state in the IAA organics lab.

The cesspit also contained some other objects, including three bone dolls from the same period.

Archaeologists Unearth Largest Ancient Roman Basilica of its Kind in Israel

The Roman basilica complex was unearthed in excavations as part of an extensive development project in the Ashkelon national park. Tel Ashkelon National Park has recently undergone extensive development work, initiated and funded by Nature and Parks Authority, Ashkelon Municipality and the Leon Levy Foundation, during which the Israel Antiquities Authority recently revealed a magnificent 2,000-year-old basilica that is the largest of its kind in Israel. 

The exciting finds, which also include an ancient odeon (theatre), are now being revealed for the first time and will soon be open to visitors to Tel Ashkelon National Park, enhancing the visitor experience at the site. The site will be opened on completion of the development, conservation and restoration work, which includes erecting sculptures and marble columns found in excavations at the site.

Nature and Parks Authority and the Ashkelon Municipality are also developing and constructing a new network of accessible paths designed to showcase and provide better access to the park’s unique nature, heritage and landscape, thereby enhancing the visitor experience.

During the Roman period, the public life of the city revolved around its basilica (a Roman public building), where its citizens transacted business, met for social and legal matters and held performances and religious ceremonies. 

According to Dr Rachel Bar-Natan, Saar Ganor and Fredrico Kobrin, excavation directors on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The huge building is covered with a roof and divided into three parts – a central hall and two side halls.

The hall was surrounded by rows of marble columns and capitals, which rose to an estimated height of 13 meters and supported the building’s roof. The floor and walls were built of marble.” 

The marble, discovered during many years of archaeological excavations lasting until two years ago, was imported from Asia Minor in merchant ships that reached the shores of Ashkelon, which was a famous, bustling trade city. Roughly 200 marble items weighing hundreds of tons have been found in all, testifying to the building’s great splendour.

Among the items, dozens of column capitals with plant motifs were discovered, some bearing an eagle – the symbol of the Roman Empire. Pillars and heart-shaped capitals stood in the corners of the building.

Excavations by the British in the 1920s unearthed huge statues, including a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory, supported by the god Atlas holding a sphere, and a statue of Isis – an Egyptian deity depicted as Tyche, the city’s goddess of fortune.

The basilica was devastated by the earthquake that struck the country in 363 CE. The effects of the seismic waves are clearly visible on the building’s floor, providing tangible evidence of the events of that year in Ashkelon. After its destruction, the building was abandoned.

During the Abbasid and Fatimid periods, the site of the basilica was transformed into an industrial area and several installations were built in it. In one of these, marble pillars and capitals from the basilica were incorporated in secondary use in the buildings’ walls. There is evidence from the Ottoman period that marble items were cut up for use as paving stones and some of the beautiful architectural features were taken for building construction.

The conservation department of the Israel Antiquities Authority is conducting complex preservation and restoration work on the odeon and the impressive basilica, led by Nature and Parks Authority and generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. The work involves placing the spectacular marble sculptures of ancient Ashkelon in the southern part of the basilica. In the first stage, the odeon will be conserved and restored.

Thanks to the Leon Levy Foundation’s donation, it will incorporate modern seating, a stage and a series of explanatory signs. At the same time, a pilot program at the site has begun installing the impressive marble items in place, in a complex operation in which one of the pillars, weighing dozens of tons, was hoisted into the basilica. The floor of the excavated basilica will be restored and filled in, and additional columns will be placed around the perimeter based on lessons learned from the initial program.

The public will then be able to access a magnificent basilica, the largest in Israel. In the meantime, visitors will be able to sit on the seating in the odeon – to be completed in the coming months – and observe the work on the nearby basilica.

Meanwhile, the new system of accessible paths being developed by Nature and Parks Authority and Ashkelon Municipality in the national park aims to make the park’s unique nature, heritage and landscape more readily available, thereby enhancing the visitor experience. The route, about 2 km long, will go through the national park’s main sites, including the world’s oldest arched Canaanite gate, the famous wells of the ancient city, the basilica and the odeon, and the Crusader walls. This chronological trail tracing Ashkelon’s history through the ages will be clearly lined with content signage.

A second trial will lead to the ancient wall and Ashkelon’s dunes, providing a glimpse of the rich flora and fauna to the south of the national park. Between the two trails, in the centre of the park, a new visitor centre will illustrate in an experiential interactive way the vibrant life of the port city and its importance throughout the various periods.

According to Shaul Goldstein, CEO of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, “The Tel Ashkelon National Park combines a fascinating antiquities site with unique natural resources characteristic of the dunes in the coastal plain. It was the first national park to be declared in Israel in the 1960s and since then, it has been constantly evolving and renewing for the benefit of visitors from all over the country. The unveiling of the basilica and odeon together with the development, preservation and restoration work, which includes the installation of pillars and ancient marble sculptures found in excavations at the site, as well as the addition of new and accessible trails around points of major interest will undoubtedly enhance visits to the park and further emphasize its heritage and uniqueness. We are grateful to our partners for providing tremendous support and guidance in the national park’s development, including the generous assistance of Mrs Shelby White and the Leon Levy Foundation under the close supervision of archaeologist Prof. Daniel Master.”

Ashkelon Mayor Tomer Glam says, “The Ashkelon National Park is one of the most important ancient sites, both in Israel and in the world, and time and time again it emerges as one of the most visited sites in the country. The city takes great pride in it, investing resources and funding in cooperation with Nature and Parks Authority, encouraging visitors by subsidizing entry for Ashkelon’s residents and promoting educational and community initiatives. We have recently also finished upgrading the entrance road to the park, which has been transformed to give the park the dignity it deserves. I am convinced that the restoration and conservation work in the park, the new archaeological discoveries and the development work – including new accessible paths – will contribute significantly to the park’s natural beauty and strengthen its status as the most beautiful and well-kept national park in Israel.”

Shelby White, the founder of the Leon Levy Foundation, explains that the conservation and restoration work was made possible, among other things, thanks to its generous donation, “When Leon and I visited Ashkelon in 1985, we did not imagine that our ties with that ancient seaport would last for over three decades. I am glad that the odeon, one of the many archaeological discoveries made by the Leon Levy expedition, will now be restored and the famous Roman sculptures of Ashkelon will be returned to their original location. Thanks to this, visitors to the Ashkelon National Park from Israel and around the world will be able to imagine this great city in all its ancient glory.”

See Also: MORE ARCHAEOLOGY NEWS

“The basilica was founded by Herod the Great, and one historical source suggests that his family came from the city of Ashkelon,” add Ganor, Dr Bar-Natan and Kobrin of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “During the Roman Severan Dynasty, in the second and third centuries CE, the building was renovated, marble architectural features were brought to the site and a small theatre was added. Herodian coins discovered in the bedding of the structure’s ancient floors show that it was built at the time of one of the greatest builders ever to have lived in the country. The writings of the historian Josephus mention Herod’s construction in the city of Ashkelon and list fountains, a bathhouse and collonaded halls. Today, based on the new archaeological evidence, we can understand the origins of the historical record.” 

Beloved Gaza bookshop becomes a casualty of Israel-Hamas conflict

“If I compare it to what is happening, it is minimal, but destroying the main bookstore we have is something serious,” said Refhat Alarir, an academic.

At 6 am on Tuesday, Sameer Mansoor answered the call at his Gaza City home. This Israeli army was asking if it was a little more than a mile away inside its bookstore and publishing house. They said that they did not want to hurt her and then they disconnected the phone.

Shortly afterwards, the store – a beloved local institution standing on the ground floor of a large building – collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Established 21 years ago, his bookstore was one of the biggest sellers of books for children, students, academics and reading enthusiasts in the Gaza Strip. He also published books and published stories written by local authors.

“The bookstore was like my soul,” said 53-year-old Mansoor, who was born in the Gaza Strip and said he had nothing to do with politics.

“Books are my life.”

The Mansoor shop was one of the casualties of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the barricaded and impoverished Gaza Strip, home to 2 million Palestinians. Hamas has been labelled a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.

According to officials on both sides, at least 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis have been killed in the fighting. According to the Government Information Office in Gaza, 184 residential buildings and 1,335 housing units have been destroyed in Gaza.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said they could not find specific information about the attack on the building that houses the bookstore.

The Israeli military said it has targeted more than 1,000 targets since the fighting began earlier this month. Israel says that its purpose is to avoid civilian casualties and that Hamas intentionally takes responsibility for locating its military infrastructure with civilians.

In addition to Israeli airstrikes, nearly 600 of the more than 4,000 rockets fired from Gaza towards Israel have fallen and landed in the Gaza Strip, according to the Israeli military, since the beginning of the fighting.

For the Palestinians, the bookstore played an important role as a centre of intellectual life, and its destruction represents a widespread loss of culture in Gaza.

“If I compare it to what is happening, it is minimal, but it is something serious to destroy the main bookstore we have,” Refhat, an academic and editor of the short story collection “Gaza Rights Back,” Alarir said.

Alarir has shopped in stores since 1997 when he began his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza. In addition to selling several titles in English, he said, the shop often supplies titles requested by customers and makes them affordable, something that other local bookstores were not able to do.

He now worries that “people won’t be able to buy the books they want, people won’t be able to read some novels for their university studies, especially for English majors.”

For Eman Bashar, Mansoor’s bookstore was more than just a place to buy books, it was a place where she met the man who had become her husband, a Palestinian writer of “The Complete Works of Ghassan Kanafani” Was bonding over a copy.

In the years that followed, Bashar, an English teacher, has built a library in his Jabalia home, which consists mainly of shop-bought books.

“This is where we met, so it killed a memory for me. It was very precious to us,” Bashar, who has two sons, said in a phone interview.

Located near several universities, including the Islamic University, Mansoor’s bookstore was also the informal home of several English-language book clubs.

Rahf Al Hallaq, a student of English literature at Islamic University, said, “When you lose a place like this, it breaks your heart because it takes away that place, which makes you the person you are.”.This latest round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians began on May 7, when Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Hamas responded by firing a rocket at Israel, which has responded with its bombing campaign.

Mansoor said he would like to renovate his store one day, though he is unsure when it will be.

“We’ll wait until the war is over,” he said.

Lost civilization: Ancient Golan rock art sheds light on the mysterious culture around Israel

The chance discovery of lines carved into the boulders of an ancient tomb in what is now the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights could offer new insight into an enigmatic culture that thrived thousands of years ago.

In a small clearing in the Yehudiya nature reserve, between yellow weeds and shaded by eucalyptus trees, huge dark basalt boulders and slabs form a small roofed chamber that opens to the east.

The megalithic structure is one of the thousands of so-called dolmens scattered around northern Israel and the wider region, burial tombs erected some 4,000-4,500 years ago in the Intermediate Bronze Era.

Today, on the plateau captured in 1967 from Syria, with Israeli soldiers securing the frontier just 23 kilometres (14 miles) away, scientists seek to shed light on the region’s distant past. The identity and beliefs of those who built the monuments remain largely unknown. But a recent serendipitous finding of rock art might change that.

About two years ago, “when one of the rangers here in the park walked her daily walk, she looked inside and saw something carved in the walls,” recalled Uri Berger, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The ranger contacted the IAA, and “when we looked inside we saw this is not just lines carved or some stains on the wall, this is rock art,” Berger said. The lines form the shapes of six horned animals of varying sizes, three facing east and three facing west, with two of them — likely a male and female — directly facing each other.

Another horned animal is carved into the interior of one panel, facing the other six. The zoomorphic depictions, hidden in plain sight since the study of the dolmens began 200 years ago, were the first to be discovered in the region and a major development for Berger and his research partner, Gonen Sharon.

Sharon, an archaeology professor at the Tel-Hai college in northern Israel, is responsible for a previous landmark discovery. Just north of the nature reserve, outside the northern Galilee Kibbutz Shamir, Sharon was hiking with his children in 2012 on a field with some 400 dolmens spread across it.

Crawling into the shade of the largest monument, Sharon sat down, looked up at the huge slab roof of the dome and said he noticed “weird shapes” that didn’t look like natural formations.

“It looked like someone made them,” he recalled.

The markings were found to be a series of man-made carvings resembling tridents.

“It turned out this was the first artwork done in the context of dolmens in the Middle East,” Sharon said. The Shamir carvings, unnoticed by generations of researchers, reinvigorated archaeological study in the area.

One of the sites revisited was inside an industrial zone near Kiryat Shmona, a town northwest of Shamir, where three small megalithic structures that survived the zone’s development a few decades ago are surrounded by circles of stones.

On the relatively rounded capstone of the largest dolmen there, two sets of short parallel lines are carved into each side of the rock, with a longer line carved below creating the image of closed eyes and a grimacing mouth facing the sky.

“The grooves don’t seem to be functional,” said Sharon. “To us, they look like a face.”

The stone monuments have “altered the landscape” of northern Israel, said Berger. But their prominence has also made them targets for antiquities theft, which largely stripped remains that could provide clues to their creators. Small pieces of ceramics, metal spearheads and daggers, bits of jewellery and beads and some bones are found at the sites from time to time, Sharon said. “But it’s very rare to find” anything, and such finds are very scattered.

“We know very little of the actual culture of the people who built them.”

With the discovery of the art carved into the stones, “we can say something that is much more than what we knew for 200 years,” said Berger.

The rock art findings — published in a recent article by Sharon and Berger in the journal Asian Archaeology — display the animal drawings in this ancient culture for the first time and present the larger pattern of visual presentation in the region. Berger said the drawings raise new questions about the people who created them.

“Why those animals? Why in these dolmens and not others? What made this one special?”

The slow but steady accumulation of artistic finds brings scholars “closer and closer” to the subjects of their research, “to the civilisation you’re looking to know about,” Berger said.

To Sharon, “this is like a letter from the past starting to suggest what was the world of culture and symbolism beyond just building and erecting very large stones.”

Mystery of the Copper Scroll: How biblical relic could lead to secret $3TRILLION treasure

When an archaeologist named Henri de Contenson was leading a team of ten Bedouin in a hillside cave a few kilometres from Qumran in 1952, he uncovered two enigmatic scrolls known as the Copper Scroll in a highly oxidized state.

It had separated into two small rolled up pieces side by side on a stone when it was first discovered in the cave. One larger part contained two similar sheets riveted together end to end while the other roll is a single sheet of hammered copper.

The Copper Scroll are part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, unlike other scrolls which are literary work and written on papyrus, these scrolls contain several locations of hidden treasures and written on thin copper.

On March 14, 1952, the Copper Scroll was found in cave 3 near Khirbet Qumran. Because the scrolls were the last of 15 Dead Sea Scrolls, it is referred to as 3Q15. The original state of the scroll is measured 2.4 m in length, 0.3 m in width and 1 mm thick.

At that time, no one dares to open the scroll without damaging the text inside it. Several years later in 1955, with great care, one of the Copper Scroll finally opened by H. Wright Baker, a Professor at Manchester College of Science and Technology (UMIST). The other scroll also opened a year later in 1956.

Because the corroded metal couldn’t be unrolled easily, Professor Baker cut the scroll into 23 parts. The language itself was a big puzzle for scholars. It was written in a square form script (an early form of Hebrew script) while other Dead Sea Scrolls were written in square form Aramaic script or ‘Paleo-Hebrew’ script.

The style of the script and the spelling in the Copper Scroll is very different from other texts of the time, from Qumran or from elsewhere. But still, It has been almost unanimously classified as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John Allegro is the first person who translated the Copper Scroll into English. And he realizes that the scroll is a list of around 64 locations of magnificent hidden treasures including massive quantities of jewellery, precious gems, other scrolls, gold and silvers.

However, the Jerusalem team advised him to not publish his findings publicly, because it can attract treasure hunters around the world and disturb the Qumran site.

At the end of 1959 and in March 1960, Allegro decided to lead two archaeological expeditions in search of the Copper Scroll’s treasures. For several months of expeditions, he wandered around in the desert and found nothing. A few months later, he decided to publish the English translation of the scroll (The Treasure of the Copper Scroll) in 1960.

Various reactions came from the scholars after reading Allegro’s translation. Father Joseph Milik, one of the member of the original Dead Sea Scrolls translation team and Father P’ere de Vaux, the head of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem, denounced it as defective and even cast doubts on the authenticity of the Copper Scroll’s contents. While others were not so sure, and today the generally accepted view is the Copper Scroll contains a genuine list of real treasures.

In 1962 the Jerusalem team published the official Copper Scroll’s translation with the title ‘Les “Petites Grottes” de Qumran, in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. In conventional translations of the Copper Scroll, the weight of gold mentioned in various locations is generally given as adding up to a staggering 26 tonnes and silver 65 tonnes.

The weights of the treasures item in the Copper Scrolls are Gold (1285 Talents), Silver (666 Talents), Gold and Silver (17 Talents), Gold and silver vessels (600 Talents), Mixed precious metals (2,088 Talents).

Items with unspecified weights are as follows: Gold ingots (165), Silver bars (7), Gold and Silver vessels (609).

One Talent is estimated to be about 76 lb or 34.47 kg and it is estimated that the Copper Scroll treasure worth around over $2 billion at current prices. The origins of the treasures listed in the Copper Scroll also led to controversy and have not been resolved until now. Several theories have been proposed by scholars.

According to the Copper Scroll Project, the treasures listed on the scroll probably span the history of Israel from the Exodus to the Babylonian captivity. The talents of precious metals and gems may very well be the excess materials called for by Moses and Aaron to build the Tabernacle.

Then there are the supplies stored away by King David for the 1st Temple. Yet on the scroll, it speaks of tithes and offerings of silver. Those could easily be from the Temple built by King Solomon and stored away for repairs and upkeep on the House of God stored in the remote treasury at Qumran. The treasury described in the document is, the long sought after treasury of Hakkoz known for centuries to be in the area of Qumran. However, it is unclear when the treasury was built.

More significant is the fact none of the conventional theories has led to the discovery of any of the treasures listed in the Copper Scroll. Until now the Copper Scroll’s treasure is still hidden somewhere while the Copper Scroll itself is housed at the Jordan Museum in Amman, Jordan

Dead Sea Scroll Analyzed With Artificial Intelligence

According to a statement released by the University of Groningen, Mladen Popović, Lambert Schomaker, and Maruf Dhali used a computer algorithm to analyze the Great Isaiah Scroll, which was discovered in Qumran Cave 1 in 1947.

However, since the scribes are anonymous, scholars have been unable to identify the individuals behind the scrolls. The University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, allowing them to uncover the scribes behind the scrolls, by combining science and the humanities. On April 21, they published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

The scribes who created the scrolls did not sign their work. Scholars suggested some manuscripts should be attributed to a single scribe based on handwriting. ‘They would try to find a “smoking gun” in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter which would identify a scribe’, explains Mladen Popović, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen.

He is also director of the university’s Qumran Institute, dedicated to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, these identifications are somewhat subjective and often hotly debated.

Scribes

That is why Popović, in his project The Hands that Wrote the Bible which was funded by the European Research Council, teamed up with his colleague Lambert Schomaker, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Schomaker has long worked on techniques to allow computers to read handwriting, often from historical materials. He also performed studies to investigate how biomechanical traits, like the way in which someone holds a pen or stylus, would affect handwriting.

In this study, together with PhD candidate Maruf Dhali, they focused on one scroll in particular: the famous Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) from Qumran Cave 1. The handwriting in this scroll seems near-uniform, yet it has been suggested it was made by two scribes sharing a similar writing style. So how could this be decided? Schomaker: ‘This scroll contains the letter aleph, or “a”, at least five thousand times. It is impossible to compare them all just by eye.’ Computers are well suited to analyse large datasets, like 5,000 handwritten a’s. Digital imaging makes all sorts of computer calculations possible, at the microlevel of characters, such as measuring curvature (called textural) and whole characters (called allographic).

Neural network

‘The human eye is amazing and presumably takes these levels into account too. This allows experts to “see” the hands of different authors, but that decision is often not reached by a transparent process,’ Popović says. ‘Furthermore, it is virtually impossible for these experts to process the large amounts of data the scrolls provide.’ That is why their results are often not conclusive.

The first hurdle was to train an algorithm to separate the text (ink) from its background (the leather or the papyrus). For this separation, or ‘binarization’, Dhali developed a state-of-the-art artificial neural network that can be trained using deep learning. This neural network keeps the original ink traces made by the scribe more than 2,000 years ago intact as they appear on digital images. ‘This is important because the ancient ink traces relate directly to a person’s muscle movement and are person-specific, Schomaker explains.

Similarities

Dhali performed the first analytical test of this study. His analysis of textural and allographic features showed that the 54 columns of text in the Great Isaiah Scroll fell into two different groups that were not distributed randomly through the scroll, but were clustered, with a transition around the halfway mark.

With the remark that there might be more than one writer, Dhali then handed the data to Schomaker who then recomputed the similarities between the columns, now using the patterns of letter fragments. This second analytical step confirmed the presence of two different. Several further checks and controls were performed. Schomaker: ‘When we added extra noise to the data, the result didn’t change. We also succeeded in demonstrating that the second scribe shows more variation within his writing than the first, although their writing is very similar.’

Handwriting

In the third step, Popović, Dhali, and Schomaker have produced a visual analysis. They created ‘heat maps’ that incorporate all the variants of a character across the scroll. Then they produced an averaged version of this character for the first 27 columns and the last 27 columns. Comparing these two average letters by eye shows that they are different. This links the computerized and statistical analysis to human interpretation of the data by approximation because the heatmaps are neither dependent nor produced from the primary and secondary analyses.

Certain aspects of the scroll and the positioning of the text had led some scholars to suggest that after column 27 a new scribe had started, but this was not generally accepted. Popović: ‘Now, we can confirm this with a quantitative analysis of the handwriting as well as with robust statistical analyses. Instead of basing judgment on more-or-less impressionistic evidence, with the intelligent assistance of the computer, we can demonstrate that the separation is statistically significant.’

New window

In addition to transforming the palaeography of the scrolls – and potentially other ancient manuscript corpora – this study of the Great Isaiah Scroll opens up a totally new way to analyse the Qumran texts based on physical characteristics. Now, researchers can access the microlevel of individual scribes and carefully observe how they worked on these manuscripts.

Popović: ‘This is very exciting because this opens a new window on the ancient world that can reveal much more intricate connections between the scribes that produced the scrolls. This study found evidence for a very similar writing style shared by the two Great Isaiah Scroll scribes, which suggests a common training or origin. Our next step is to investigate other scrolls, where we may find different origins or training for the scribes.’

In this way, it will be possible to learn more about the communities that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. ‘We are now able to identify different scribes’, Popović concludes. ‘We will never know their names. But after seventy years of study, this feels as if we can finally shake hands with them through their handwriting.’

Additional information:

Digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the Great Isaiah Scroll were kindly provided by Brill Publishers and the Israel Antiquities Authority (the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library).

From 6-8 April 2021, an international online conference took place, Digital Palaeography and Hebrew/Aramaic Scribal Culture, organized by the University of Groningen. A link to presentations will appear soon on this page: https://www.rug.nl/ggw/news/events/2021/digital-palaeography-and-hebrew-aramaic-scribal-culture

Reference: Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, and Lambert Schomaker, Artificial Intelligence Based Writer Identification Generates New Evidence for the Unknown Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls Exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)

The ancient helmet was worn by a soldier in the Greek-Persian wars found in Israel

A well-preserved Greek ancient helmet near the Israeli city of Haifa was discovered in 2007 by the crew of a dutch ship crossing the Mediterranean Sea. As required by local law, the dredging vessel’s owner promptly handed the find over to archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

Now, reports the Greek City Times, researchers have offered new insights on the object, which is the only intact helmet of its kind found along Israel’s coast.

Crafted in the sixth century B.C., the Corinthian armour was likely used during the Persian Wars, which pitted Greek city-states against the Persian Empire in a series of clashes between 492 and 449 B.C.

“[It] probably belonged to a Greek warrior stationed on one of the warships of the Greek fleet that participated in the naval conflict against the Persians who ruled the country at the time,” says Kobi Sharvit, director of the IAA’s Marine Archaeology Unit, in a statement.

After spending 2,600 years on the seafloor, the helmet’s cracked surface is heavily rusted. But scholars could still discern a delicate, peacock-like pattern above its eyeholes. This unique design helped archaeologists determine that craftsmen made the armour in the Greek city-state of Corinth.

According to Ancient Origin’s Nathan Falde, metalworkers would have fashioned the piece to fit tightly around the head of a particular person—but not so tightly that it couldn’t be swiftly and safely removed in the heat of battle.

“The helmet was expertly fabricated from a single sheet of bronze by means of heating and hammering,” notes the statement. “This technique made it possible to reduce its weight without diminishing its capacity for protecting the head of a warrior.”

As Owen Jarus wrote for Live Science in 2012, archaeologists excavated a similar helmet near the Italian island of Giglio, which is about 1,500 miles from where the crew found the recently analyzed artefact, during the 1950s.

That headgear—also around 2,600 years old—helped modern scholars determine when craftspeople manufactured the Haifa Bay armour.

Experts speculate that the headpiece’s owner was a wealthy individual, as most soldiers wouldn’t have been able to afford such elaborate gear.

“The gilding and figural ornaments make this one of the most ornate pieces of early Greek armour discovered,” wrote Sharvit and scholar John Hale in a research summary quoted by UPI.

One theory raised by researchers speculates that the helmet belonged to a mercenary who fought alongside the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, per the Express’ Sebastian Kettley.

Another explanation posits that a Greek soldier stationed in the Mediterranean donned the headpiece, only to drop it into the water or lose it when his ship sank.

Though archaeologists aren’t sure exactly who owned the artefact, they do know that the warrior sailed the seas at a time when Persia controlled much of the Middle East.

As Live Science’s Jarus explains in a more recent article, the Persians attempted to invade Greece around 490 B.C. but were defeated near Athens during the Battle of Marathon.

A second attack by the Persians culminated in the Battle of Thermopylae, which saw a heavily outnumbered group of Spartans led by King Leonidas mount a doomed last stand against Xerxes’ Persian forces. (The 480 B.C. clash is heavily dramatized in the film 300.) But while Thermopylae ended in a Greek loss, the tides of war soon turned, with the Greeks forcing the Persians out of the region the following year.

In the decades after the Persians’ failed invasions, the Greek military continued the fight by campaigning against enemy troops stationed in the eastern Mediterranean. 

Ancient Origins notes that the helmet’s owner was likely active during this later phase of the war—“when the Persians were often on the defensive” rather than offensive—and may have served on either a patrol ship or a battleship.