Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Dead Sea Scrolls online


Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time in a project launched by Israel's national museum and Google, said an AAP report on the CIO website.

The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea Scrolls on the internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians - who were once criticised for allowing them to be monopolised by small circles of scholars - to make them available to anyone with a computer.

The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Web surfers can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English.

The five scrolls are among those purchased by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers, having first been found by Bedouin shepherds in the Juddvean Desert.

That project, aimed chiefly at scholars, is set to be complete by 2016, at which point nearly all of the scrolls will be available on the internet.

Read the full article HERE

And go HERE to see the first of the digitised collection.


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