Full Breakdown
Tracing Scribes and Scrolls: ERC-Funded Quest to Locate the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Origins
7/2/2026, 11:46:26 AM
Project Overview
Professor Mladen Popovic (University of Groningen) leads the ERC-funded five-year, €2.5 million “Tracing Scribes and Scrolls” project. With the Israel Antiquities Authority and labs, the team will analyze ~250 parchment, papyrus and ink samples, compare their chemical signatures with Egyptian papyri, and apply AI pattern detection to locate production sites and map scribal networks in ancient Judea.
Historical Context
The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in Qumran caves (1947-1956), include the earliest known Tanach manuscripts and a collection of Jewish literary works from the Second Temple period. Their manufacturing origins—Qumran, Jerusalem or elsewhere—remain contested.
Research Team and Partners
Lead investigators are Popovic and Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri (IAA). The team also includes scientists, chemists and AI specialists such as Maruf Dhali (Groningen), Ilaria Degano (Pisa), Leila Birolo (Naples Federico II), Kaare Rasmussen and Frank Kjeldsen (Southern Denmark), plus KU Leuven and the Egyptian museums in Berlin and Turin.
Scope and Numbers
Funding: €2.5 million ERC grant. Duration: five-year project. Sample size: ~250 fragments from the IAA’s collection. Corpus: >25,000 scroll pieces. Methods: chemical profiling, AI pattern detection, paleography, codicology, and comparison with Egyptian papyri. The project will generate a database of chemical composition for all analyzed fragments.
Official Statements
Popovic calls the project an “extraordinary window into the intellectual world of ancient Judea” and promises a new material-composition database that will serve scholars. Cohen-Ofri stresses the IAA’s preservation role and its commitment to scientific investigation, noting the collaboration expands the Authority’s material-analysis expertise and benefits the public.
Scholarly Debate
Some scholars warn that chemical and AI evidence may not alone resolve the Qumran-versus-Jerusalem origin dispute, urging synthesis that combines scientific data with textual and archaeological analysis.
Conflicting Reports & Gaps
The sources agree on funding, partners and methodology; specifics of the AI algorithms, the timeline for data release and the terms of public access to the database remain unspecified.
Verbatim Quotes
- “This is the largest research project to date to use artificial intelligence to investigate the cultural context of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” — Professor Mladen Popovic, Principal Investigator
- “These manuscripts provide an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of ancient Judea.” — Professor Mladen Popovic
- “The Israel Antiquities Authority is entrusted with the preservation, documentation, and study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we continue to invest significant effort in advancing their scientific investigation,” — Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri, IAA
- “Participating in an international project of this scale enables the Israel Antiquities Authority to contribute its expertise in material analysis of artifacts to some of the most important questions in Dead Sea Scrolls research, benefiting both the scholarly community and the broader public,” — Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri
Future Steps
The team will build the chemical-composition database, generate AI-derived scribal maps, and provide a digital resource for scholars to reassess the scrolls’ geographic and cultural origins.
