How scientists virtually unwrapped an ancient, burned scroll and read the words inside

Sometimes science seems like science, and sometimes it seems like magic. “The discovery of the text in the En-Gedi scroll absolutely astonished us,” said Pnina Shor, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Projects at the Israel Antiquities Authority, which keeps the scroll in its archives. “Like many badly damaged materials in archives around the world, the En-Gedi scroll was shelved, leaving its potentially valuable contents hidden and effectively locked away by its own damaged condition.” The study was led by Brent Seales, a professor and chairman of the department of computer science at the University of Kentucky-Lexington who has been working with technology and damaged materials for two decades. Michael Segal, a professor of biblical studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who is analyzing the virtually unfurled scroll, said it offers important evidence of the state of biblical texts between the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those discovered several centuries later. “It’s incredibly impressive,” said Greg Bearman, a former JPL researcher and consultant for the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls digital library who was not involved in the work.