c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Inscribed near the time of Jesus, stored in caves for two millenniums and uncovered in 1947, a wrinkled scrap of leather stored in Teaneck, N.J., hid the key to an ancient psalm.
The Dead Sea Scrolls fragment was almost more holy relic than historical artifact before archaeologist Robert Johnston and his fellow researchers came along. Using a digital camera and computer-driven analysis, Johnston’s team did what is becoming increasingly commonplace _ they made the ancient document speak.
Out of a blackened patch emerged several lines, among them: “Blessed is the Lord who causes us to rejoice, for that is why You created us.”
“The characters popped right out; to be able to see writing that had not been seen for over 2,000 years was very exciting,” says the Rev. John Peter Meno of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Teaneck. Meno is general secretary of the Eastern United States archdiocese of the Syrian Orthodox Church, which owns the fragment.
The find eventually yielded what is being called a harvest hymn, a never-before-seen Jewish psalm.
Johnston and his colleagues have been pioneering ways to use imaging technologies once reserved for spies and astronomers to mine the secrets of ancient texts blackened or faded by time.
The team, sponsored by Eastman Kodak Co. and Xerox Corp., has been experimenting with multispectral imaging at the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Sciences, of which Johnston is dean.
The imaging techniques were developed to enable spy satellites to identify, for example, an army tank hidden by fog or a jungle canopy. In the case of ancient texts, it helps researchers differentiate between ink and background by detecting minute differences in the light waves (or spectra) they reflect.
Light visible to the naked eye has wavelengths in the range of 400 to 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Using a digital camera sensitive to light ranging from 200 nanometers (ultraviolet) to 1,100 nanometers (infrared), the researchers photograph documents in light of several different wavelengths until they find the ones that offer the most detail. Ink may reflect light at, say, 900 nanometers, while the blackened leather in the background might reflect at 910 nanometers. A computer, analyzing the differences, can identify hidden characters.
Typically, Johnston’s team extracts only tiny, though crucial, nuggets.
Looking at a rare red-ink scroll of the Old Testament Book of Samuel yielded only one previously unknown character. Still, “The scholar involved was so thrilled that he went out and wrote whole papers on it,” says Keith T. Knox, a member of Johnston’s team and a principal scientist at Xerox’s Digital Imaging Technology Center in Webster, N.Y.
Among the thoroughly mined texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found only 18 new characters in their examination of color photos of the Temple Scroll _ which at 28 feet is the longest mostly intact scroll.
So the harvest hymn find, on a scrap of liturgical scroll, was a virtual mother lode. When combined with other scroll fragments and translated by professor George J. Brooke of the University of Manchester in England, it read: “The Festival of our Peace. The fruit became plump due to the Heavens and the produce of the Earth of living things, so we give thanks to your name, forever. Blessed is the Lord who causes us to rejoice, for that is why You created us.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written in the Semitic language of Aramaic between 68 B.C. and A.D. 250 and hidden in caves near Qumran, which some scholars think was an ancient Jewish settlement. The writings shed light on aspects of early Jewish religious and secular life during the era when Romans sacked Jerusalem, around A.D. 70, and as Christianity was dawning.
“These things are so fragile, they can just crumble at a touch,” Meno says. “The amazing thing about this technology is it allows us to literally see through it to other layers of writing without ever touching these very fragile artifacts.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls are only the beginning. Johnston next hopes to image a 10th century copy of the works of the Greek mathematician Archimedes. The text was washed off its leather pages in the 12th century and overwritten with stories of Christian saints, a common practice in those times, Johnston says.
The group did some initial imaging work on the text when it was auctioned by Christie’s of London, and in July they submitted to its new owners a proposal to try to uncover the entire document. Now, however, they have competition.
“Since I got started in the early 1990s, there has been a boom in imaging science,” Johnston says.
When the team began its work, Kodak made it possible by donating a nearly one-of-a-kind digital camera originally custom-made for a government agency. Xerox pitched in expensive Unix workstation computers and highly technical imaging software.
“Five years ago, even three years ago, the number of places that could do this was very small,” says Roger Easton, another team member. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was one of the few shops that could match the Rochester group’s technology and know-how.
Today, archaeologists take $700 infrared-capable consumer video cameras and laptop computers into the field to record and analyze finds as they are unearthed, Easton says. The detail isn’t nearly as good as with the Rochester equipment, nor the analysis so sophisticated, but it’s getting better all the time.
DEA END WYLIE
