dead sea scrolls

View a 2,000-year-old scroll of the Ten Commandments online

Google is once again offering a glimpse into ancient history with online images of rare scrolls dating back more than 2,000 years.

Courtesy of Google, in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the new Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library is now home to detailed digitized photographs of thousands of biblical and non-biblical manuscripts. These ancient scrolls were discovered in remote caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956.

Among them, the scroll of the Ten Commandments may be one of the most fascinating. Dating back to sometime between 30 B.C. and 1 B.C., the … Read more

Dead Sea Scrolls come to life on the Web

Discovered in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been available for viewing only in a museum in Israel...until now.

Thanks to some expert digital photography and a project set up by Google, high-resolution photos of five of the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls can now be seen online. The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Web site offers a peek into the distant past, allowing people to view and examine the scrolls in fine detail.

Photographed by digital photographer Ardon Bar-Hama, the images contain as many as 1,200 megapixels, according to Google, so that people can zoom in to get … Read more

Google chosen to digitize Dead Sea Scrolls

If anybody could be forgiven for missing the deadline to opt out of the Google Books settlement, it's probably the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has tapped Google to digitize the famous texts, one of the earliest documents ever discovered chronicling the early years of Christianity. CNN reports that Google will be responsible for scanning the 900 manuscripts, which are actually comprised of more than 30,000 fragments discovered in caves around Israel in the 1940s and 1950s.

Israeli researchers had come to worry about the ability of the scrolls to endure further photography, … Read more