The Hands that wrote the Bible - ERC Project

2015 - 2022

The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible was set up in 2015 to tackle two fundamental problems in the palaeography of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those two problems were: the lack of a method to identify the anonymous scribes and to date manuscripts based on their writing style, as none carries an internal date.

The project used state-of-the art image processing and pattern recognition tools developed by Lambert Schomaker’s research group at Artificial Intelligence in Groningen in order to analyse high-resolution multispectral images of the Dead Sea Scrolls made by the Israel Antiquities Authority and also on digitized images of the scrolls by Brill Publishers.

Interdisciplinairy project

Combining the humanities and the sciences, we have succeeded in establishing an empirical, quantitative basis for the palaeography of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which can also be applied to other historical corpora. Our digital palaeography allows us to better determine the identity of scribes or the difference between them, without bias. Additionally, our digital palaeography allows us to date manuscripts, without it being a self-fulling prophecy or cherry picking.

The combination of AI, statistics, and post-hoc visual inspection makes for a robust, new method for writer identification, and is an advancement for the field. Our method changes how we do palaeography by benefitting from the combination of different disciplines, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches.

See our article in PLoS ONE, April 2021. This study was widely covered in the media, e.g., BBC, Euronews, Haaretz, ABC, El País, New Scientist.

The project follows on from the successful exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Drents Museum in Assen in 2013/2014, and the online course that was devised as part of this exhibition.

International conference 2021

Our international online conference in April 2021 was important for knowledge and technology transfer and to engage and test our novel tools and results for the community of both traditional palaeographers and AI experts. See the introduction by professor Popovic and YouTube for all presentations.

ERC Starting Grant

The project was funded by the European Research Commission with an ERC Starting Grant. This grant is aimed at outstanding researchers with 2-7 years of experience after their PhD. It enables them to set up their own research line. The ERC is highly competitive, with a success rate of just 10%.

People involved

• Prof. Mladen Popović - project leader
• Prof. Lambert Schomaker - project leader
• Ayhan Aksu
• Maruf Dhali
• Gemma Hayes
• Ruan van der Iest
• Drew Longacre
• Hans van der Plicht