The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen a €2.5 million Advanced Grant for a five-year international research project that will investigate one of the most fundamental questions in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship: where were the scrolls produced and copied, and what can their origins reveal about centers of learning, scribal culture, and the transmission of knowledge in ancient Judea?
The project, Tracing Scribes and Scrolls, brings together researchers from the University of Groningen, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and leading laboratories and research institutions across Europe. By combining state-of-the-art chemical analysis, artificial intelligence, paleography, and codicology, the research aims to reconstruct the geographical and cultural contexts in which the scrolls were produced.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, under the guardianship of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, comprise one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. They include the earliest known manuscripts of many books of the Hebrew Bible, together with a remarkable collection of Jewish literary works dating from the late Second Temple period. Despite decades of research, the precise locations where many of the scrolls were manufactured, prepared, and copied remain unknown.
Were at least some of the scrolls written at Qumran by a Jewish community living in seclusion there? Were others brought from additional centers of scribal activity in Judea, perhaps from Jerusalem, and hidden in the caves in times of danger? Or did the caves also serve as a library, or as a kind of ancient genizah? These questions stand at the heart of the new project.
Professor Popović, one of the world's leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls, will lead a multidisciplinary team of historians, archaeologists, material scientists, chemists, and artificial intelligence specialists over the next five years. ERC Advanced Grants are among Europe's most prestigious research awards, supporting internationally recognized researchers in pursuing ambitious, high-impact scientific research.
Working in close collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the team will analyze approximately 250 samples from the Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls collection, including parchment, papyrus, and ink. For the first time, papyri from Egypt will be examined alongside papyri from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites, allowing researchers to compare their chemical signatures directly. These analyses are expected to help identify the material “fingerprints" of the scrolls, reveal the provenance of raw materials, identify production practices, and uncover connections between different centers of scribal activity.
The chemical data will be processed using advanced artificial intelligence tools capable of identifying complex patterns that are difficult to detect through conventional analysis. These results will then be integrated with paleographic studies of handwriting, codicological analysis of the physical construction of the scrolls-including sheet preparation, column layout, margins, and stitching techniques-as well as linguistic and literary evidence.
Together, these complementary approaches will enable researchers to develop an unprecedented model for mapping the more than 25,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments preserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The project aims to place individual manuscripts and scribes within their geographical and chronological contexts while identifying centers of writing, learning, literary production, and knowledge transmission in ancient Judea-and potentially beyond.
According to Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen, Principal Investigator of the project: "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. By combining advanced laboratory analysis with the study of ancient handwriting and the remarkable advances in artificial intelligence 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."
The project builds on Professor Popović's previous ERC-funded project, The Hands That Wrote the Bible, which pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to identify individual scribes responsible for copying the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tracing Scribes and Scrolls expands this work by moving beyond the identification of scribal hands to investigate where scribes worked, the materials they used, and the broader cultural and intellectual networks in which the manuscripts were created and circulated.
Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri of the Israel Antiquities Authority, one of the collaborators on the project, said: "The research will create an unprecedented database on the chemical composition of samples from the Dead Sea Scrolls. 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. In recent years we have come to recognize the wealth of information that can be recovered from the materials themselves-parchment, papyrus, and ink-revealing hidden insights preserved within thousands of manuscript fragments that have survived for more than two millennia. 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."
The project brings together team members and laboratories at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem (Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri), the University of Pisa (Ilaria Degano), the University of Naples Federico II (Leila Birolo), and the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (Kaare Rasmussen and Frank Kjeldsen). At the University of Groningen, Dr. Maruf Dhali plays a central role in developing and implementing the artificial intelligence methods that will integrate the project's chemical data and identify patterns of provenance and scribal affiliation. The project also includes collaborations with the Egyptian Museums in Berlin and Turin, as well as KU Leuven, as part of a comparative study of papyri from Egypt and the Judean Desert.