En-Gedi Scroll

Radiocarbon dating at the Weizmann Institute of a charred fragment presumed to be from the scroll gave a C14 age of 1754±40 years. This dating was challenged by Ada Yardeni, who proposed on the basis of letter shapes that the scroll should be dated to the second half of the first century CE or the beginning of the second. Drew Longacre disputed Yardeni's analysis, arguing that it was misled by the paucity of comparative material from later centuries. In Longacre's analysis, the paleographical evidence supported the radiocarbon date. ==Text==

The innermost portion of the scroll contains a large blank area typically placed at the start of a scroll in order to protect it. For this reason, the researchers concluded that Leviticus was the first book on the scroll and that at most three books of the Torah were originally present. ==Discovery and recovery==

Discovery The En-Gedi Scroll was discovered in a 1970 excavation headed by Dan Barag and Ehud Netzer of the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University, and Yosef Porath of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) at the ancient synagogue in Ein Gedi in Israel, the site of an ancient Jewish community. It was found in the burned remains of the ancient synagogue's Torah Ark. Severely damaged by a fire around 600 CE, the scroll appeared as burned, crushed chunks of charcoal. Each disturbance caused the scroll to disintegrate, leaving few options for conservation or restoration. The scroll fragments were preserved by the IAA, although for decades after its discovery the scroll remained in storage due to its severely damaged condition. Recovery The scroll's fragility led scientists to search for non-traditional techniques to reconstruct the text of the document virtually. This search led to the development of a virtual unwrapping technique developed by Prof. W. Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, which in 2015 allowed scientists to reveal the text contained in the scroll. This creates the sharp contrast seen between the text and the scroll in the final images. When the scroll completes a full rotation in regard to the X-ray source, the computer generates a 2D slice of the cross-section, and performing this iteratively allows to build up a 3D volumetric scan describing the density as a function of the position inside the scroll. The only data needed for the virtual unwrapping process is this volumetric scan, so after this point the scroll was safely returned to its protective archive. ==See also==