Scanning software deciphers ancient biblical scroll

The discovery, announced in a Science Advances journal article by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem on Wednesday, was made using "virtual unwrapping," a 3D digital analysis of an X-ray scan.

The digital technology, funded by Google and the U.S. National Science Foundation, is slated to be released to the public as open source software by the end of next year.

The biblical scroll examined in the study was first discovered by archaeologists in 1970 at Ein Gedi, the site of an ancient Jewish community near the Dead Sea.

Last year, Yosef Porath, the archaeologist who excavated at Ein Gedi in 1970, walked into the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls preservation lab in Jerusalem with boxes of the charcoal chunks.

The lab has been creating hi-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies of biblical texts ever discovered, and he asked researchers to scan the burned scrolls.

Using the "virtual unwrapping" technology, he and his team painstakingly captured the three-dimensional shape of the scroll's layers, using a digital triangulated surface mesh to make a virtual rendering of the parts they suspected contained text.

The researchers say it is the first time a biblical scroll has been discovered in an ancient synagogue's holy ark, where it would have been stored for prayers, and not in desert caves like the Dead Sea Scrolls.