These ancient manuscripts were discovered seventy years ago in caves near the Dead Sea.

Discover the secrets of ancient writing with the help of artificial intelligence

Researchers claim that they have used artificial intelligence to discover that the writing on the mysterious ancient documents found in the form of scrolls from caves near the Dead Sea was written by two scribes.

Researchers have experimented with manuscripts of these ancient scrolls on a document called the "Great Book of Isaiah" which suggests that two unknown individuals may have copied handwritten words in ancient language. Was

One of the oldest manuscripts found in caves in the form of a scroll is said to be a copy of the Old Testament. These manuscripts, discovered 70 years ago, are a surprise to people today.

A portion of these ancient manuscripts were found by local Bedouins in a cave on a mountain called Qamran near the Dead Sea. These mountains in West Jordan are now under Israeli occupation.

Most of these manuscripts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and are thought to date back to the third century BC.

The Book of Shi'a is one of the 950 different manuscripts found in these caves in the 1940's and 1950's. This manuscript is unique in that its 54 columns are divided in half and they are written in the same way.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used artificial intelligence to study the book Shia at the time, using the most modern and sampling method. He analyzed a letter of the Hebrew letter 'A' which was mentioned 5,000 times in this book.

Researchers Mladen Popovich, Maruf F. Zale and Lambert Schumacher say in a research paper that they have "succeeded in understanding the ancient ink marks that appeared on digital images."

According to him, the signs of ancient ink show the movements of a person's arm and hand muscles and these are specific to each person's own style. He used this method to find out if more than one person was involved in writing a manuscript.

"It's more likely that the two scribes will continue to work together so that they can maintain the same style of writing but at the same time show their uniqueness."

According to the researchers, the similarity in writing indicates that the scribes were given the same training in the same madrassa or in the same family, for example, both were trained to write by their father.

He says that the ability of the scribes to imitate each other was so excellent that so far many experts could not understand the difference between the two scribes.

Researcher of Bangladeshi descent

One member of this team of researchers is a well-known scholar who belonged to the Islamic University of Technology in Bangladesh before coming to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He writes in his research that 'this book is written at least five thousand times in A, or A. It is impossible to compare them all with the naked eye.

'Computers are more suitable for analyzing large datasets, as you can compare a letter A 5,000 times. Digital imaging of letters at the micro level enables all kinds of computer calculations, such as measuring the angle or roundness of the letters (called textural), as well as the structure of the whole letter (called allographic). ) Can also be measured

Neural network

The leading analyst conducted the first analytical test of this study. His analysis of textural and alographic features shows that the 54 columns of text in the scroll of the Great Book of Shia are divided into two different groups which were not divided by clusters, but by their clustered order. Were made

With the comment that there could be more than one author of this scroll, Dhale handed over the data to his fellow researcher Schumacher, who now examined the similarities between the columns using the pattern of the letter fragments.

This second analytical phase confirmed the existence of two different authors. "When we did extra work on the data, the result didn't change," Schumacher said. We also managed to prove that the second writer shows more variations in his writing than the first writer, even though his writing seems to be exactly the same.

The style of writing

In the third phase of the research, Popovich, Zale and Schumacher presented a visual analysis. He created 'heat maps' that study different forms of each letter's style throughout the manuscript.

He then created an average version of the character pattern for the first 27 columns and the last 27 columns. Comparing these two average letters with the eyes shows that they are different. This computerized and statistical analysis closely integrates data with human interpretation, as the heatmap is neither developed nor relied upon by primary and secondary analytics.

Due to some aspects of the book and the position of the text, some researchers had formed the opinion that a new author starts work after column 27, but this opinion was not generally accepted.

"We can now confirm this with quantitative analysis of handwriting, as well as analysis of robust statistics," says Popovich. Instead of judging on the cognitive evidence, computer artificial intelligence can tell us where the difference between the work of two different writers begins.

New opportunities

This analysis of the great book of Isaiah and its success in identifying other authors in the manuscript of this manuscript now opens up new possibilities for the analysis of other ancient manuscripts found in the Qur'an.

Researchers can now access the micro-levels of the scrolls written by both authors and carefully observe how they worked on these manuscripts.

"It's very interesting because it provides a new opportunity to understand the ancient world, which could reveal a very complex relationship between experts and researchers," said Popovich.

"In this study, we find evidence of a very similar style of writing that identifies the identical training or authenticity of the two scribes in the scroll of the Great Isaiah."

"Our next step is to investigate other scrolls, where we can find information about the beginnings or training of their various scribes."

That way we can learn more about the societies that developed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"We now have the ability to identify different writers," says Popovich. We will never know their names. But after 70 years of study, it seems that we will finally shake hands with them through their writing.