En-Gedi Scroll

Damaged by a fire in approximately 600 CE, the scroll is badly charred and fragmented and required noninvasive scientific and computational techniques to virtually unwrap and read, which was completed in 2015 by a team led by Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky.

[1] Radiocarbon dating at the Weizmann Institute of a charred fragment presumed to be from the scroll gave a C14 age of 1754±40 years.

[4] Drew Longacre disputed Yardeni's analysis, arguing that it was misled by the paucity of comparative material from later centuries.

[7] The En-Gedi Scroll was discovered in a 1970 excavation headed by Dan Barag and Ehud Netzer of the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University, and Yosef Porath of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) at the ancient synagogue in Ein Gedi in Israel,[8] the site of an ancient Jewish community.

[9] Severely damaged by a fire around 600 CE, the scroll appeared as burned, crushed chunks of charcoal.

[2] The scroll's fragility led scientists to search for non-traditional techniques to reconstruct the text of the document virtually.

[2] The virtual unwrapping process begins with using X-ray microtomography (micro-CT) to scan the damaged scroll.

The only data needed for the virtual unwrapping process is this volumetric scan, so after this point the scroll was safely returned to its protective archive.

After segmentation and texturing, each piece of the virtually deconstructed scroll is ordered and has its corresponding text visualized on its surface.

This requires the virtual unwrapping process to include a step that converts the curved 3D geometric pieces into flat 2D planes.

While this is good enough to create a basic image of what the scroll looks like, there are some distortions which arise because each segment is individually flattened.

This step also re-flattens and re-textures the image to create the final visualization of the unwrapped scroll, and is computationally expensive compared to the texture merging process detailed above.

Using each of these steps, the computer is able to transform the voxels from the 3D volumetric scan and their corresponding density brightnesses to a 2D virtually unwrapped image of the text inside.