Dead Sea Scrolls Online – A New Marriage Between Technology And History

The Dead Sea Scrolls online, a new project launched by Google proves that technology and history can be more than good friends. And it also proofs that difference of age is not a problem for some relationships to work well.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a famous collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea and are the most valuable religious texts known to man. Their age dates them at somewhere between the third and first centuries BCE. Since 1965, they have been on display in Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. Now it doesn’t need anymore to go there to have access to the texts. It just needs to open up a browser. Five of the scrolls have been digitized using high resolution 1,200 megapixel photographs – that’s approximately 200 times greater than an average camera – captured by Ardon Bar-Hama a renowned photographer of antiques. He used ultraviolet-protected flash tubes to light the scrolls for 1/4000th of a second. The exposure time, much shorter than a conventional camera flash, was designed to protect the scrolls from damage.

Now people, wherever they are, can view the texts in great details. The design of the project also allows a translation of the site presenting the original Hebrew in English and there is a search engine based on keywords and passages from the text. Users can share comments for others to read.
Google is taking care of hosting all the data for this project on its initiative to provide universal access to information. Behind the website and high resolution images can be found Google Storage and Google App Engine serving up the data to maintain this marriage a successful living.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rYj_0foJYA

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