NASA technology reveals hidden script on Dead Sea Scrolls

Scientists used NASA technology to reveal hidden scripts on Dead Sea Scrolls.

ByJames Okungu
May 2, 2018, 6:39 PM
A handout photo made available by the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Lab in the Israel Museum shows a fragment as it appears to the naked eye (L) and the same fragment as it appears using a multispectral imaging camera from the Great Psalms Scroll in Jerusalem, May 02, 2018.
A handout photo made available by the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Lab in the Israel Museum shows a fragment as it appears to the naked eye (L) and the same fragment as it appears using a multispectral imaging camera from the Great Psalms Scroll in Jerusalem, May 02, 2018.
Shai Halevy/HANDOUT/EPA via Shutterstock

NASA technology is enabling scientists to read information from fragments of Dead Sea scrolls that are invisible to the naked eye.

Shai Halevy, a photographer in the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Laboratory in the Israel Museum, shows the Great Psalms Scroll along with a fragment that contains letters in Jerusalem, May 02, 2018.
Shai Halevy/EPA via Shutterstock

Researchers at Israel Antiquities Authority examined scroll fragments with the aid of a multispectral imaging camera developed by NASA to reveal script that could not be seen until now.

A conservator uses tweezers to hold fragments of a Dead Sea scroll, at the scrolls' conservation laboratory of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem on May 2, 2018.
Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images
Shai Halevi, the photographer responsible the image processing of thousands of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, stands next to a unique camera with special LED lights inside in Jerusalem on May 2, 2018.
Gali Tibbon /AFP via Getty Images

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of hundreds of biblical texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek discovered in the 1950s in Qumran caves on the West Bank near the Dead Sea.

A large fragment of a scroll found in "Cave 11" is pictured next to another small fragment which recently with the aid of advanced imaging equipment revealed a previously unseen hidden text.
Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images

The thousands of scrolls fragments are being digitized and made available to scholars.

A view of the Shrine of the Book, displaying some of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, May 02, 2018.
Jim Hollander/EPA via Shutterstock

EPA contributed to this report.

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