The Dead Sea Scrolls were written over centuries, and now fresh analysis may shed light on material origins. How does the Egyptian papyrus industry come into the story?
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were written over centuries, and now fresh analysis may shed light on material origins. How does the Egyptian papyrus industry come into the story?
09:01 AM • July 01 2026 IDT
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the earliest known versions of biblical texts as well as several apocryphal and apocalyptic ones. They have naturally captivated the world since their discovery began in 1947. Nearly a century has passed since the first scrolls were found in the Qumran Caves reportedly by a Bedouin shepherd looking for a missing sheep. Ever since, scholars have been poring over them for decades. Science has made vast strides ahead, yet much remains to be elucidated about these ancient manuscripts.
Such as, where did they come from. Were they written at Qumran? Jerusalem? Somewhere else? Various holes in the Judean Desert? All the above?
We may yet find out and scholars can stop arguing, now that the European Research Council has awarded scrolls scholar Mladen Popovic of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands a €2.5 million grant to lead a 5-year international project called "Tracing Scribes and Scrolls." The project involves researchers at the Israel Antiquities Authority, the universities of Pisa and Naples and the University of Southern Denmark in Odense on that very question: Where were the scrolls produced and copied?
The anticipation is that their origins will shed light on biblical-era scribal culture and the transmission of knowledge in Judea, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on Tuesday.
To be clear, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written over hundreds of years. Once thought to date narrowly to the Late Second Temple period and its immediate aftermath, an international collaboration of scientists aided by Enoch the AI program revealed that some were written as early as the 4th or 3rd centuries B.C.E. and some as late as the 2nd century C.E. About three-quarters of the scrolls are in different forms of Hebrew. Most of the rest are in Aramaic, with some in Greek.
Ergo, multiple research angles suggest that the scrolls do not have a single origin. It is also unclear when and by whom and why they were deposited in the caves by the Dead Sea. (Today the scrolls are in Jerusalem, under the guardianship of the Antiquities Authority.)
The parchments and papyruses, and the one scroll made of copper, give us glimpses into the evolution of biblical and extra-biblical texts, resulting in the Bible as we know it today, as well as a window onto apocalyptic angsts in the Second Temple period. All in all, the corpus consists of four almost complete scrolls, and about 25,000 fragments believed to have originated in perhaps 900 scrolls. The new project headed by Popović with the IAA will analyze about 250 samples from the scrolls collection.
Also, for the first time, papyruses from Egypt will be examined alongside papyri from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites.
What do Egyptian papyri have to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls? Ilit Cohen-Ofri of the Antiquities Authority, an expert on chemistry in archaeology, explains. "Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on parchment," she says – referring to animal skin. With the exception of the anomalous Copper Scroll, the rest were written on papyrus.
"The question is where the papyrus was produced," she says. Reeds do grow in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, but back in the day, the Romans probably satisfied their papyrus needs from Egypt. Still, there may have been other sources. Comparison of ancient Egyptian papyri with ones from the Dead Sea caves can put this question to rest. It could also shed light on another claim bruited about, that the scrolls show Egyptian influence; or influence of Jews living in Egypt, which they did, not only in how the manuscripts were wrapped and then sealed into clay jars but in content.
In short, the new analyses of papyrus, parchment and ink adding to the growing body of paleographic studies of handwriting, codicological analysis of the physical construction of the scrolls as well as linguistic and literary evidence will hopefully suss out the source of the material for the scrolls, and possibly unveil connections between remote centers of scribal activity.
In part of the project led by Maruf Dhali from Groningen, AI will be used to process the chemical data and to seek patterns in the writing that are difficult to detect through conventional analysis. The new research may even shed light on why the scrolls were put into the caves, the Antiquities Authority adds. Whether the reason was to hide from danger (from those awful Romans), to maintain a library, or for storage – really isn't known.
"This is the largest research project to date to use artificial intelligence to investigate the cultural context of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts provide an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of ancient Judea," Popović said in a statement. "By combining advanced laboratory analysis with the study of ancient handwriting and the remarkable advances in AI made in recent years, we are now able to address questions that were previously beyond our reach: who copied these manuscripts, where they were produced, how knowledge circulated, and the role these texts played within the society of their time."
In previous work funded by the European Research Council, Popović pursued "The Hands That Wrote the Bible," which tapped AI to identify individual scribes responsible for copying the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Asked about the international nature of the project, Cohen-Ofri points out that isolated analysis of fragments is all very well but a huge project involving massively carbon dating and analyzing a large set of fragments (around 250) is another financial level entirely, hence the involvement of the European Research Council. As for its motives, everybody is interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeologists point out.
One therefore wonders why nobody looked into the provenance of the material for the scrolls before. "For decades, scholars focused almost exclusively on the texts preserved in these scrolls and gave little thought to the Dead Sea Scrolls as archaeological artifacts. That has finally begun to change in recent years," suggests Yonatan Adler of Ariel University, who isn't involved in this research.
"It remains to be seen whether this particular project will succeed in its stated aim of identifying the provenance of the scrolls," he notes. "But every effort of this kind certainly adds to the growing body of data we are uncovering on the material aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls."
Cohen-Ofri heads the conservation lab at the antiquities authority and handled analysis of the ink. It is soot. All of it? The ones checked so far, which helps show why a large, expensive project is necessary. Isolated words and phrases, such as the divine name, in some scrolls were written in scarlet ink, she adds – made mainly of cinnabar, a naturally occurring, toxic mineral colored bright red.
"Cinnabar is very expensive!" she says, the exclamation mark clear over the telephone. "Why would a cult isolating itself in the desert obtain cinnabar? That's a question. Maybe these scrolls were indeed brought from somewhere else?"
Maybe in five years' time we will know, thanks to an international collaboration working on the scrolls that matter to everybody.
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