Google Digitizes Ancient Dead Sea Scrolls for Free Online Access
Digitizing world heritage seems to be slowly but surely becoming fashionable. After the world’s most expensive book and the Mayan apocalypse book, ancient Dead Sea Scrolls are now also being scanned. This time, none other than Google is taking responsibility.
The endeavor is technically by no means simple. Most of the 2000-year-old documents consist of thin parchment, tanned goat or sheepskin, papyrus, or even copper sheeting. So, a certain level of caution is needed in digitization to avoid damaging the scrolls. The total 850 scrolls contain 15,000 text fragments from ancient Judaism and were found in caves in the West Bank between 1947 and 1956. The documents were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, about 200 texts are also the oldest known manuscripts of the Bible.
With this, Google is digitizing a piece of world and literary history, allowing the content to be accessed for the first time in high quality for free on the Internet. This is happening on a specially set-up site by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, called “The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls“. What’s special about this digitization is that the website is also geared towards international visitors. Part of the scrolls can thus be explored in English – so knowledge of Hebrew is not strictly necessary.
The whole venture is estimated to cost Google around 2.5 million euros.
And here is the fitting promotional video:
